' LIBRARY OF CONGRESS,] 



Shelf / > 

UNIT 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 









\ 
\ 








♦ * 



THE 



CLASSIC PREACHERS 



OF THE 



ENGLISH CHURCH 



LECTURES DELIVERED AT ST. JAMES'S CHURCH 
IN 1877. 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION 



By JOHN EDWARD KEMPE, M.A., 

CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN, PREBENDARY OF ST. PAUL'S, 
AND RECTOR OF ST. JAMES'S, WESTMINSTER. 




NEW YOEK: 
E. P. DUTTON & CO., 713, BROADWAY 
1877. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

INTRODUCTION" v 

DONNE (The Poet-Preacher) .' 1 

J. B. Lightfoot, D.D., Canon of St. Paul's, and Margaret 
Professor of Divinity, Cambridge. 

BARROW (The Exhaustive Preacher) 27 

H. Wace, M.A., Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn, and Professor 
of Ecclesiastical History, King's Coll., London. 

SOUTH (The Rhetorician) 53 

W. C. Lake, D.D., Dean of Durham. 

BEYERIDGE (The Scriptural Preacher) 81 

W. R. Clark, M.A., Prebendary of Wells, and Vicar of 
Taunton. 

WILSON (The Saintly Preacher) 100 

F. W. Farrar, D.D., Canon of Westminster. 

BUTLER (The Ethical Preacher) 135 

E. M. Goulburn, D.D., Dean of Norwich. 



INTRODUCTION, 



Speaking of places of Christian worship, Hooker 
says " Our repair thither is especially for mutual 
conference and, as it were, commerce to be had 
between God and us ; " * and whatever tends to 
defeat this end, or, indeed, does not forward it, can 
hardly fail to be prejudicial to the spiritual life of 
the Church. 

A distinguished physicist has been heard to de- 
scribe, almost in the same breath with the avowal of 
his inability to join in any religious service, as such, 
the great enjoyment which he derived from listening 
to anthems, chanting and hymns. In the province 
of devotion this was an example of what we may 
conceive to take place in that of religious teaching 
and exhortation. The attraction of able and in- 
teresting literary exercitations may not only gather 
to the pulpit an auditory which neither seeks nor is 
likely to derive any spiritual benefit from such 
hearing, but may seriously mislead many persons 



* 'Eccl. Pol.' V. xviii. 1. 



vi 



INTRODUCTION. 



who are not insensible of their need of that help 
which preaching is divinely appointed to afford. If 
they have bnt listened to the preacher with a moderate 
degree of attention, and still more if they have had 
any kind of unobjectionable pleasure in hearing him, 
they may go away persuaded that they have realised 
all the benefit of the ordinance, and fulfilled all 
their duty towards it ; and yet its effect upon them 
may not have been at all more spiritual or religious 
than was that of sacred harmonies in the instance 
which has just been mentioned.* The notion that 
a religious duty is done when its forms have been 
perfunctorily observed, and well done when this has 
been accomplished pleasantly or easily, is but a 
variety of the theory of the opus operatum, and 
a very dangerous one too, because it is not so 
obviously and repulsively superstitious as are some 
of those which an enlightened Christianity will 
unhesitatingly reprobate.f 



* " It is certain that a sermon, 
the conclusion whereof makes 
the auditory look pleased, and 
sets them all a-talking one with 
another, was either not right 
spoken or not right heard." — 
Burnet's ' Pastoral Care,' c. ix. 

t In this connection I may be 
allowed to quote the following : — 
" Many persons were found at 
Church for the great Christian 
ceremonies, and at the theatres 
or even at the temples, fur the 



heathen spectacles. The ritual 
of the Church was viewed as a 
theatrical exhibition. The ser- 
mons were listened to as the 
displays of rhetoricians ; and elo- 
quent preachers were cheered 
with clapping of hands, stamping 
of feet, waving of handkerchiefs, 
cries of ? Orthodox ' ! ' Thirteenth 
Apostle ' ! and other like demon- 
strations, which such teachers as 
Chrysostom and Augustine often 
tried to restrain, in order that 



INTRODUCTION. 



vii 



At the same time it is easy to justify, though 
not without some reservation, the policy of making 
the service of the sanctuary attractive to the culti- 
vated intellect as well as to a refined taste. The 
kind of considerations which may be allowed to 
prevail in recommendation of an element which is 
ceremonious, spectacular and sensuous in worship, 
may be extended with much less hesitation to 
efforts by ^hich the intelligence of the community 
is sought to be conciliated towards the ministra- 
tions of the pulpit. It is surely a gain if minds 
which cannot otherwise be reached and feelings 
which cannot otherwise be moved by holy in- 
fluences are, in any way which is not in itself 



they might persuade their flocks 
to a more profitable manner of 
hearing. Some went to church 
for the sermon only, alleging that 
they could pray at home. And 
when the more attractive parts 
of the service were over, the great 
mass of the people departed, 
without remaining for the ad- 
ministration of the Eucharist. 
.... Things which would have 
been good either as expressions 
of devotion or as means of training 
for it, became through their mul- 
tiplication, and through the im- 
portance which was attached to 
them, too likely to be regarded 
as independent ends. ' — Robert- 
son, 'History of the Christian 
Church,' Book II., c. vi., p. 356. 
Truly history, ecclesiastical as 



well as civil, repeats itself. Let 
any one go to St. Paul's Cathedral, 
at an ordinary Sunday morning- 
service, if he would see, that not 
! only, as is the case in nearly every 
! church, "without remaining fur 
■ the administration of the Eucha- 
rist," but without even remaining 
to take away the text of the 
sermon, a great part of the con- 
gregation will still depart when 
the more attractive, i.e. the musi- 
cal, portion of the service is over. 
It is impossible, however, to be 
toothankfid for the improvement 
whicli has taken place of late 
years in the reverent and devo- 
tional tone and aspect as well 
as in the general " rendering " 
of the St. Paul's services. 



Vlll 



INTRODUCTION. 



prejudicial or unlawful, brought into a contact 
with sacred things from which spiritual profit may, 
at any rate, be fairly hoped for. Let us take 
the case of the Bible itself. If that Holy Yolume 
had contained nothing but what the dullest might 
understand, the most unlettered interpret, and the 
most disputatious agree about, a large number 
of those who now study it diligently, and not 
without advantage to their souls, would, for want 
of intellectual stimulus, read it, if at all, with 
most unprofitable distaste and weariness. Given, 
as it is, in a form which affords occasions so 
numerous and of such great variety for mental 
activity and power to be applied to it, many are 
drawn and fixed to its pages by the pleasant sense of 
a healthful and (so to say) manly intellectual exer- 
cise, and are thus familiarised with objects, modes 
of thought, and principles of conduct which are 
calculated to direct and colour those higher faculties 
whereby the soul of man can hold converse with 
Heaven. And that which is true of the Word written, 
is also true of the Word preached. The first point is 
to get an attentive and respectful hearing for it. 
This secured, it becomes comparatively easy to turn 
that hearing to its proper account. 

But as, in the case .of worship, the ceremonial will 
be anything but justifiable if it interposes a conceal- 
ing or obscuring medium between the worshipper 
and the object of his worship, so, in that of preaching, 



INTRODUCTION. 



ix 



it is not enough that its auditory is collected in a 
consecrated building, and that its utterances proceed 
from a gowned or surpliced orator, mounted in a pulpit. 
Call it by what name we will — a discourse, a lecture, 
an address, a homily, or what not — the ideal which 
is implied in the designation sermon, should never 
be lost sight of, always be distinctly aimed at. " So 
worthy a part of divine service," says Hooker, " we 
should greatly wrong if we did not esteem Preaching 
as the blessed ordinance of God, sermons as keys 
to the kingdom of heaven, as wings to the soul, as 
spurs to the good affections of man, unto the sound 
and healthy as food, as physic unto diseased minds ; "* 
and directly or indirectly — more (as I venture to 
think) directly than indirectly — these purposes ought 
to be subserved whenever a Christian congregation 
is addressed from a Christian pulpit by a Christian 
minister. 

No opinion is here intended as to what is called 
the greater utilisation of our Churches and Cathe- 
drals by allowing semi-secular Lectures or Addresses 
to be delivered in them. This may or may not 
be defensible and expedient. The Society for Pro- 
moting Christian Knowledge is not denied to be 
within its functions in issuing books, provided they 
are wTitten in a religious spirit, that fall under 
the designation of "General Literature," and so 



* ■ Eccl. Pol.' V. xxii. 1. 



X 



INTRODUCTION. 



possibly it may be held that, at least upon week- 
days, and with adequate safeguards (if such could be 
devised), we should do well to open our Churches 
for purposes auxiliary to religious ends, though not 
directly and distinctively directed to them. This is 
a question which it would be out of place to discuss 
here. The discourses in this volume were delivered 
at a regular Sunday service, and what was sought 
was to reconcile their introduction there with those 
views of the proper use of the pulpit at such times, 
which have ever prevailed, and I devoutly trust ever 
will prevail, in our own and nearly every other 
Christian communion. The aim was that in their 
effect upon the congregation they should be sermons, 
in accordance with the description quoted above 
from Hooker, and be distinctly understood and felt 
to be such. It was earnestly desired that they 
should not cause the Church in which they were 
delivered to be regarded as a kind of ecclesiastical 
Lecture Hall — a Royal Institution for Sundays — as 
in former times certain London chapels were said to 
relieve the tedium of the day by furnishing persons 
who could not make up their minds to ' miss 
Church ' altogether, with the opportunity of whiling 
away a weary hour at a Sunday opera. 

This object, as I thought, would not be attained, 
nor the danger avoided, if certain great English 
divines were treated generally, so that the discourses 
devoted to them should form so many portraits in 



INTKODUCTION. 



xi 



the gallery of the National Church, so many chap- 
ters in its history, or so many articles in its bio- 
graphical dictionary. The proposal of a Series of 
Lectures, to be delivered in the Chapel of King's 
College, upon "The Masters in English Theology,"* 
was almost simultaneous with that of the discourses 
in this volume ; and when my friend Canon Barry 
mentioned it to me, with the expression of a hope 
that I might not think it would clash with mine, 
I at once welcomed it with cordial approval. The 
pulpit of an educational institution, of which the 
theological department forms the most prominent 
and the most important feature — of which, indeed, 
it may be said that the theological is the distinc- 
tive character | — is undoubtedly most legitimately 
employed in such teaching as those Lectures are 
intended to communicate ; especially as there is no 
pastoral charge connected with the chapel, and it 
cannot be considered — its size alone would prevent 
that — to supply to the students in general the place 
of a parish Church. But the very title of those 
Lectures at once points to an auditory of a different 

* Now published by Mr. I sufficient to mark the pre-emi- 
Murray. nence of its theological over its 

f This is said with the utmost j medical character. The question 
respect for the great medical of the comparative efficiency, 
school connected with the Col- I popularity or extent of any par- 
lege. The fact that the Principal ticular department of the College 
of the Institution is required to ! is not meant to be in any way 
be a Divine, who is also its head raised, or even hinted at or im- 
theological Teacher, is of itself plied. 



Xll INTRODUCTION. 

kind from that which was either wished or likely to 
be gathered in St. James's Church at the delivery 
of this present series. That title has, at least, an " ad 
clerum" look or sound, whereas, in my scheme, 
although a higher than the average intelligence of a 
parochial congregation was certainly aimed at, it was 
the " ad populwm " character that I was supremely 
anxious should prevail, as being more consistent, if 
I should not say alone consistent, with the time, 
the place, and the circumstances of its designation. 

And it was for this reason that none of the great 
Anglican divines but such as were known and dis- 
tinguished as preachers were included in the series, 
and that those who were included were required to 
be treated with especial reference to their sermons. 
This treatment was intended to be completely secured 
by annexing to each of their names a designation 
descriptive of the peculiar characteristic of the 
preaching of each. The attempt was one of some 
little difficulty, and it is doubtful whether it can 
be successfully extended to as many more of our 
great preachers without repetition. So far as they 
have gone, however, the designations seem to be 
neither fanciful nor, in any instance, other than 
accurate. 

How the great ends of Christian preaching were 
considered to be promoted by such treatment of 
such subjects must now be explained. 

Our Blessed Lord bids His disciples be careful 



INTRODUCTION. 



Xlll 



what and how they hear.* It would be straining 
these cautions from their true meaning and purpose 
to apply them directly to the due estimate of what 
Christian preaching should be ; but they may fairly 
suggest the consideration whether it is not of the 
utmost importance that our congregations should 
be disabused of mistaken and false notions upon 
that subject, and indoctrinated with sound ones. 
We cannot suppose, without attributing to the 
pulpit a superiority to human infirmity far greater 
than it can lay claim to, that the taste and demand 
of the people will not always greatly influence, 
if not the substance of its teaching, at any rate 
the form, manner and method of it — if not the tl 
aKoverat, at any rate the 7rw?. No doubt it will 
be the pulpit itself that will, in the first instance, 
create the popular taste and give direction to the 
popular demand. An individual or a small set, the 
nucleus, perhaps, of what grows into a party, will 
strike out some kind of novelty, more or less 
marked, and either for the better or for the worse. If 
it ' takes,' the example will be followed, until nearly 
every pulpit in the communion will be more or less 
affected by the influence. Any one who has care- 
fully observed the preaching of the English Church 
during no longer a period than the last half century, 
must see that the changes it has gone through 



* j8A.€7reTe ri anovere. St. Mark I fiXeirere 7rws anovere. St. Luke 
iv. 24. I viii. 18. 



xiv 



INTRODUCTION. 



have been scarcely less evident than those of i the 
fashions' themselves. The social habits and the 
costume of the present decade are not more varied 
from those of 1830 or 1850 than is the kind of 
preaching which now commands the most general 
approval from that which drew crowds from the 
West End to Bishopsgate, when Bishop Blomfield 
was Kector; or made St. Mary's at Oxford such a 
centre of power,* when John Henry Newman de- 
livered his Parochial Sermons there. The com- 
parative desertion which is occasionally witnessed of 
good preachers who were once attractive, and who 
continue to preach as well as ever they did, though 
partly attributable to the popular craving for novelty, 
is not always wholly due to that cause. When it is 
said of such an one that " his day is gone by," it often 
means, not that everybody has heard all he has to 
say, and that to continue " sitting under " him is to be 
served only with eramhe repetita ; but that his style 
or method is no longer in vogue. He does not hit 
the taste and fall in with the tone of the times. In 
short, he is out of fashion. t To say, therefore, that 
preaching will be greatly influenced in respect to its 
style, and somewhat even in respect to its matter, by 
the consideration of popular taste and demand, is not 



* See Prof. Shairp's 'Studies 
in Poetry and Philosophy,' p. 
275. 

f A similar phenomenon is ob- 



served by Burnet in regard to 
the preaching of the period from 
the Eefor mation to his own time. 
' Pastoral Care,' c. ix. 



INTRODUCTION. 



XV 



necessarily to attribute to preachers any feeling that 
is blameworthy. St. Paul asks, " How shall they 
hear without a preacher ? " * and the converse ques- 
tion may also be put, "How shall one preach without 
hearers ?" It is hardly enough for him to be satis- 
fied that he is delivering, Sunday after Sunday, 
sermons that will stand every test, literary, ortho- 
doxal, and even spiritual, if Sunday after Sunday 
his auditory dwindles away, and what remains of it 
grows more and more listless and drowsy, turns 
more and more glances at the gallery clock, or more 
and more openly and discourteously draws out and 
consults the tardy-moving watch. In fact, the 
preacher will and must accommodate himself to some 
extent to the liking of his hearers, and therefore it 
is a matter of importance, as affecting the quality of 
his sermons, that his hearers should bring to the 
hearing a just estimate of what sermons ought to be, 
and the faculty of distinguishing what is good and 
wholesome in them from what is unprofitable, not 
to say deleterious, even though it may be agreeable. 

As a help towards forming such tastes and culti- 
vating such faculties, a better acquaintance with " the 
Classic Preachers of the English Church " seemed 
likely to be of service. The idea was not at all that 
those preachers should be held up as models for 
imitation in the present day, but simply that the 



* Eomans x. 14. 



xvi 



INTRODUCTION. 



study of them should be recommended and their ex- 
cellences understood and appreciated. To produce in 
the pulpit of the nineteenth century sermons which 
Andre wes or Donne, Sanderson or Butler, South 
or Barrow, might themselves be supposed to have 
written, or rather which might pass for theirs with 
persons who have some little acquaintance with their 
writings, would be a feat of considerable literary 
cleverness, but worse than useless for any purpose of 
nineteenth-century preaching. Classic models are 
studied, not for the purpose of enabling the artist or 
the writer to produce works which shall resemble, or 
even be of the same character with, those models, 
but in order to imbue him with feelings, furnish him 
with principles, and elicit, animate, and strengthen 
for him perceptions which he may apply to the em- 
bodiment of his own original ideas. By this means 
he is trained to observe in the best way, that is, un- 
consciously, those laws of art, every violation of which 
detracts from the value of his work, and all con- 
formity to which is an enhancement of its excellence. 
When Burnet recommends the clergy to fit them- 
selves for their pulpit ministrations by "reading 
Quintilian, and Tully's book of Oratory, and by 
observing the spirit and method of Tully's Orations : 
or if they can enter into Demosthenes," to use him 
" as a much better pattern,"* no one supposes that he 



* ' Pastoral Care,' c. ix. 



INTRODUCTION. 



xvii 



would have them attempt in their sermons a kind of 
Christianised classicality of structure and language. 
Similarly it must not be imagined that in seeking to 
extend a knowledge of our greatest preachers, and to 
awaken an interest in them, with a view to the more 
complete efficiency of the pulpit of our own day, any 
such foolish and futile notion was entertained as 
that those preachers might be what we should call 
copied with advantage. I should question the de- 
sirableness of even modernising and adapting them 
for present use ; not so much, however, for the reason 
against using other men's sermons, which Burnet 
gives, viz. lest it should " too evidently appear that 
he " who- does this " cannot be the author of his own 
sermons," which would " make both him and them 
lose much of their weight,"* as because every age 
and almost every generation has its own peculiar 
modes of thought as much as, or even more than, 
of expression. Though the Gospel itself can never 
be "another," t it admits of endless variety in the 
manner in which it is presented and commended to ac- 
ceptance, a variety which may be legitimately turned 
to account, and ought to be turned to account, by 
accommodating its preaching, of course within proper 
limits, to the peculiar wants, tempers, tastes, and 
other circumstances of each particular period, as well 
as each particular country, church and congregation. 



* ' Pastoral Care,' c. ix. 
[st. .tames's.] 



t Galat. i. 7. 

b 



xviii 



INTRODUCTION. 



And as it was never contemplated that the 
preachers treated of in this series should be held up 
as patterns for direct imitation, so neither was it 
that their faults and defects should be overlooked or 
extenuated. On the contrary, it was quite expected 
that nearly all of them would afford occasions for 
pointing out blots, blemishes, and imperfections, 
which might be scarcely less useful as warnings than 
their excellences and beauties might be as guides. 
The series is not meant as a contribution to English 
hagiology ; and if it were, the Advoeatus Diaboli 
would have a perfect right to insist that virtues 
should not be attempted to be magnified by the 
suppression of truth with regard to anything that 
deserved censure or that ought to qualify praise. The 
Saints of the Universal Church are men about whose 
errors, indeed whose sins, their inspired histories 
make no secret ; and it certainly was neither ne- 
cessary nor advisable to proceed upon a different 
principle in depicting these lesser lights, particularly 
when the purpose for which they were to be depicted 
is borne in mind. To indicate, and even somewhat 
to exaggerate, what is faulty in their preaching, 
could scarcely weaken — it might even strengthen— 
the effect of a fair statement of their title to the 
rank they hold. That they should have achieved, 
in spite of such drawbacks, the eminence accorded 
to them by universal consent, might reasonably be 
argued to be evidence of an extraordinary balance of 



INTRODUCTION. 



xix 



the highest merit, and might well challenge all the 
attention and study which their greatest admirers 
could desire to see devoted to them. The saintliness 
of Wilson infusing itself into his homely common- 
place, and lending a holy charm even to his poverty 
of thought; the tenderness, the fervour and the 
poetry of Donne reconciling us to his fancies, ex- 
travagances and affectations ; the deep thought and 
adamantine reasoning of Butler compelling us to 
find ample excuse for his severe and unevangelical 
dryness ; Barrow by his conscientious thoroughness, 
his robust strength, and his solid weight, overcoming 
our impatience of lengthiness and elaborate detail ; 
Beveridge by his " simplicity and godly sincerity," 
his intimacy with the Word of God and his admir- 
able use of it, his Apostolical Churchmanship and 
his deep piety, winning us to find in his prosaic 
plainness, his diffuseness and his prolixity, little or 
no hindrance to our assent to his warmest eulogists ; 
and South, by his masterful command of well-nigh 
every art and resource of the consummate orator, his 
energy, his boldness, his wit, his lucidity and bril- 
liancy of language, overcoming the repugnance which 
his fierce combativeness and deficient spirituality 
might well excite — these all are examples of tran- 
scendent excellence, establishing its claims by the 
help of the very things which might well prove 
incompatible with aught that could be acknowledged 
as great excellence at all. 



XX 



INTRODUCTION. 



It must not be supposed that the attempt to 
encourage the study of sermons which have taken 
their place as classical in the literature of the Church, 
is in any way influenced by a wish, either that a more 
artificial and (as it were) literary style of preaching 
should prevail, or that extempore preaching should 
be discouraged. With regard to the latter, it may 
be worth consideration whether there is not some 
reason to apprehend that it threatens to become too 
common; but its practice is not only not incom- 
patible with diligent study of homiletic literature, 
but requires it even more than * preaching from 
book.' Coleridge would seem to have been singularly 
unfortunate in his experience of extempore preachers, 
for, so far, at least, as the Church of England is 
concerned, the case was hardly so bad about forty 
years ago as he describes it to have been.* It is 
certainly a good deal better now. At the same time, 
his description must be acknowledged to represent 
very truly the state of things which extempore 



* " No doubt preaching, in the j book, who did not forget his 
proper sense of the word, is more | argument in three minutes' time, 
effective than reading : and there- j and. fall into vague and unprofit- 
fore T would not prohibit it, but j able declamation, and generally 
leave a liberty to the clergyman very coarse declamation too. 
who feels himself able to accom- These preachers never progress ; 
plish it. But as things now are, they eddy round and round. 
I am quite sure I prefer going to Sterility of mind follows their 
church to a pastor who reads his ministry." — ' Table Talk,' vol. ii. 
discourse : for I never yet heard p. 103. 
more than one preacher without 



INTRODUCTION. 



XXI 



preacliing has a tendency to produce ; and hence the 
greater the disposition to adopt that method, and 
the greater the probability of its adoption becoming 
general, the greater will be the need of such studies 
as may control and regulate it, so that it may be for 
edification and not for destruction.* 

These are days of a teeming press, of cheap books, 
of education becoming almost universal and con- 
sequently of oral instruction becoming less and less 
generally necessary. Nevertheless, that kind of in- 
struction will always have a place in every depart- 
ment of knowledge, and in that of sacred knowledge 
it can never lose the rank assigned to it in the form 
of preaching by the Divine appointment. It may, 
indeed, fail to have its position duly recognised, its 
proper function rightly understood, and adequate 
use made of it as a means of grace. As in an early 
age, so now, it may be driven or lowered from its 
proper estate by an undue exaltation of ritual t on 
the one hand, or on the other by the spread of a 
critical and contemptuous intellectualism. But ap- 
preciated or not, well and sufficiently used or not, 
it will always be an office committed to the Church, 
and a power intrusted to her, which lay her under 
a vast and most solemn responsibility as to the 
account which she is able to give of it. " It was 
the pulpit beyond anything else that carried the 

* 2 Cor. x. 8. I the Christian Church,' Book vi., 

t See Robertson's 'History of | c. i. § ix. 



XXII 



INTRODUCTION. 



Eeformation through" . . . and thus "achieved a 
more extensive and a more lasting conquest than all 
the armies of England ever did. The effect of a 
victory by the vulgar force of war passes and is for- 
gotten, whereas that of the pulpit at the Eeforma- 
tion endures to this day — will endure throughout 
all time and in all eternity. Such capacity for good 
has the pulpit. Again, it was the pulpit that awoke 
the nation to the civil wars in the reign of Charles 
beyond every other instrument. . . . The main 
alarum — the primary spring — of all the movements 
of the powerful party that eventually subverted 
both throne and altar, was the London pulpit — the 
London pulpit which received the watchword from 
the stirring spirits of the rising government and 
communicated the shock to all the pulpits within 
the four seas. Such power had the pulpit for evil — 
the latter instance answering my purpose as well as 
the former ; for it seems to demonstrate the energy 
there is in the pulpit, at least, however applied ; 
and the consequent obligation there is upon us, who 
have it in our own hands to make the most of such 
an engine, and not allow it to go to sleep"* — to 
which I will add, or deteriorate or fail to keep pace 
with an advancing intelligence. 

A few words must be added to justify the con- 
sistency with the main design of these Lectures of 



* Prof. J. J. Blunt, 'Duties of the Parish Priest,' Lect. V.p. 142. 



INTRODUCTION. 



XX111 



those biographical and personal sketches and refer- 
ences which are contained in all of them. These 
were indispensable not only to the completeness and 
truth of the delineations, but also to the production 
of their intended effects. There is no branch of 
oratory, scarcely any of literary composition, into 
which the individual man ought to enter so much 
as into preaching. The advocate may and often 
must identify himself so completely with his cause 
or his client as to make him put his own personality 
aside altogether, and even seem to believe and 
feel otherwise than he really does. The senator 
deals with a class of questions which are generally 
out of the sphere of his inner life — that life which 
constitutes the true self. But this is the sphere 
into which it is the first object of the true preacher 
to make his way, and within which his preaching, 
to be really effective, must live and move and 
have its being. Unreal words — that is to say, words 
which represent- motives, beliefs, affections and 
thoughts which are not truly those of him who utters 
them — can never hold their ground and exercise 
any strong and enduring influence in that sphere. 
It is only the true self of one man that can ever 
bring itself into that close contact and communion 
with the true self of another, by which it becomes 
to that other as the channel or instrument of God's 
renovating grace. This consideration, as it will 
explain much of the power, will also account for 



xxiv 



INTRODUCTION. 



much of the weakness of the preachers here recom- 
mended for study, and of a multitude of others who 
have exercised and do exercise the like office with 
theirs. Above all, it will serve as an admonition to 
us who have been called to that office, that we 
make it our supreme endeavour and most earnest 
prayer that we may ourselves be what we tell others 
that God, theirs and ours, would have us be. 

J. E. K. 

St. James's Rectory, 7th Sept. 1877. 



%* It is hoped that this series may be followed 
next year by a second, comprising most of the 
following : Andrewes, Taylor, Sanderson, Hall, 
Horsley, Tillotson, Seeker, Bull, Sharp, Home, Paley 
and Leighton, if the last can be properly included 
amongst Preachers of the English Church. 



DONNE, 



THE POET-PREACHEE. 



" Tell me which of them will love him most." — St. Luke vii. 42. 
" There are last which shall be first." — St. Luke xiii. 30. 



Donne's monument in St. Paul's — Its character and history an 
emblem of the man — His early life — His friendships — Donne as a 
poet — The double dislocation in his life — His conversion from 
Eomanism — His earlier immorality and later penitence — Com- 
parison with St. Augustine — Effects on his preaching — The secret 
of his power as a preacher — His reluctance to enter Holy Orders 
and ultimate ordination — His energy and reputation as a preacher 
— His extant sermons — Dean Milman's opinion — Animation of his 
preaching — Examples of his style — Appearance and manner of 
the preacher — Walton's description of him — His faults — Affecta- 
tion overcome by the theme — His practical sense — His pointed 
sayings — His irony — The last sermon — His death — Lesson of his 
life and teaching. 

Against the wall of the south choir aisle in the 
Cathedral of St. Paul is a monument which very- 
few of the thousands who visit the church daily 
observe or have an opportunity of observing, but 
which, once seen, is not easily forgotten. It is the 
long, gaunt, upright figure of a man, wrapped close 
in a shroud, which is knotted at the head and feet, 
and leaves only the face exposed — a face wan, worn, 

[ST. JAMES'S.] B 



2 



CLASSIC PKEACHEKS: 



almost ghastly, with the eyes closed as in death. 
This figure is executed in white marble, and stands 
on an urn of the same, as if it had just risen 
therefrom. The whole is placed in a black niche, 
which, by its contrast, enhances the death-like pale- 
ness of the shrouded figure. Above the canopy is 
an inscription recording that the man whose effigy 
stands beneath, though his ashes are mingled with 
Western dust, looks towards Him whose name is the 
Orient.* 

This monumental figure is not less remarkable in 
its history than in its aspect. It is the sole me- 
morial which has survived from the ancient church 
of St. Paul destroyed by the great fire. For 
many generations it lay neglected in the crypt, 
amidst mutilated fragments of other less fortunate 
monuments of the past, till, three or four years 
ago, it was rescued from its gloomy abode under- 
ground and erected in its present position, cor- 
responding, as nearly as circumstances allowed, to 
the place which it occupied in the old Cathedral 
before the fire.f The canopy and inscription were 



* An allusion to the Vulgate 
rendering of Zech. vi. 12, " Ecce 
vir Oriens nomen ejus " (conip. 
iii. 8), translated ''The man 
whose name is the Branch" in 
the Authorised Version. This 
text is quoted several times in 
Donne's Sermons, and appears to 
have been a favourite with him. 



f In old St. Paul's it stood 
against a pier so as to face East- 
ward, the aspect being adapted 
to the words; but this position 
was impossible in the present 
Cathedral, unless the monument 
had been placed in some other 
part of the building. 



DONNE. 



3 



restored from an ancient engraving. In its history 
and in its character alike this monument is a fit 
emblem of him whom it figures ; for it speaks of a 
death, a resurrection, a saying as by fire. It is the 
effigy of John Donne, who was Dean of St. Paul's 
shortly before the outbreak of the Great Rebellion. 

Moreover, it has a peculiar interest arising from 
the circumstances under which it was erected in the 
first instance. It was not such a memorial as Donne's 
surviving friends might think suitable to commemo- 
rate the deceased, but it was the very monument 
which Donne himself designed as a true emblem of 
his past life and his future hopes. His friend and 
biographer relates* that, being urged to give di- 
rections for his monument, he caused an urn to be 
carved ; that he wrapped himself in a winding-sheet, 
and stood thereupon " with his eyes shut and with so 
much of the sheet turned aside as might show his 
lean, pale, and death-like face, which was purposely 
turned towards the East, from whence he expected 
the second coming of his and our Saviour Jesus ;" 
that, in this posture, he had a picture of himself 
taken, which " he caused to be set by his bedside, 
where it continued, and became his hourly object till 
his death ;" and that from this picture the sculpture 
was executed after his decease, the inscription having 



* Walton's 'Life of Donne,' p. | published by Causton, "with some 
141. The edition quoted is that | original notes by an Antiquary." 

B 2 



4 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES : 



been written by Donne himself. In its quaint affec- 
tation and in its appalling earnestness this monu- 
ment recalls the very mind of the man himself. 

John Donne was born in 1573, the year after the 
Massacre of St. Bartholomew. He was the child of 
Koman Catholic parents, and in their faith he was 
brought up. At the age of eleven he went to Hart 
Hall, Oxford ; at the age of fourteen, or thereabouts, 
he was "transplanted" to Trinity College, Cambridge. 
At neither University did he proceed to a degree, 
for his friends had a conscientious objection to his 
taking the required oath. He was still only in his 
seventeenth year, when he commenced the study of 
the law, and soon after he entered Lincoln's Inn. 
Of his subsequent life for some years we catch only 
glimpses here and there. He was a courtier and 
an associate of nobles and statesmen. He numbered 
among his friends and acquaintances nearly all the 
most famous literary men of the day — Ben Jonson, 
Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Wotton, Selden, Bishop 
Hall, Bishop Montague, Bishop Anclrewes, George 
Herbert, Izaak Walton. He was a great traveller 
and a great linguist, a diligent student, a man of wide 
and varied accomplishments. His versatility is a 
constant theme of admiration with those who knew 
him.* At the age of twenty he wrote poems which 



* See Grosart's preface to 
Donne's ' Poems,' ii. pp. xvi. sq. 
Coleridge also, comparing him 



with Shakespeare, speaks of his 
" lordliness of opulence," ib,, p. 



xxxviii. 



DONHE. 




his contemporaries regarded as masterpieces. His 
fame as a poet was greater in his own age than 
it has ever been since. During the last century, 
which had no toleration for subtle conceits and 
rugged rhythms, it was unduly depreciated ; but 
now again it has emerged from its eclipse. No 
quaintness of conception and no recklessness of 
style and no harshness of metre can hide the true 
poetic genius which flashes out from his nobler 
pieces. 

It has been said that God's heroes are made out 
of broken lives. There is indeed vouchsafed to the 
steady progressive growth of a career which has 
known no abrupt transition, and in which the days 
are " bound each to each by natural piety," a calm 
wisdom, a clear insight, an impressive influence, 
unattainable on any other terms ; but for the fire, 
the passion, the impulsive energy which bears down 
all opposition, we must not uncommonly look to 
a dislocated life. This dislocation may be either 
of two kinds. It may be a dislocation of theological 
belief, like Luther's ; or it may be a dislocation 
of moral character, like Ignatius Loyola's and John 
Banyan's ; the dislocation of the convert or the dis- 
location of the penitent. Donne's, like Augustine's, 
was both the one and the other. 

He grew up to maturity, as we saw, a Eoman 
Catholic ; but while still a young man, he began to 
study the Eoman controversy, as he himself says, 



6 



CLASSIC preachers: 



" with no inordinate haste nor precipitation in bind- 
ing myself to any local religion." " I had a larger 
work to do," he writes, " than many, other men." 
He tells us that in this investigation he " surveyed 
and digested the whole body of divinity " relating to 
the controversy ; and he calls God to witness, that he 
" proceeded therein with humility and diffidence in 
himself," and with " frequent prayer and equal and 
indifferent affections." * As the result of this search 
after truth, he joined the Anglican communion. 
It seems to me that the influence of this change has 
impressed itself, as it could hardly fail to do, on his 
preaching. In saying this, I do not refer to the 
purely controversial parts, where the fact mast be 
obvious. The remark applies to the general scope 
and character of his sermons. They owe their chief 
force to the intense earnestness with which he 
dwells on the atoning power of Christ's passion; 
and I cannot doubt that, from the intellectual side, 
his vividness and grasp of conception on this point 
owed much to his study of the Boman controversy. 

Of the other dislocation, the discontinuity of his 
moral life, it is more painful to speak ; but no study 
of Donne as a preacher would be at all adequate 
which failed to take account of this fact. His friend 
Izaak Walton, in an elegy written a few days after 
his death, has incidentally compared him to the chief 



* Preface to his 4 Pseudo-Martyr,' p. 3. 



DONNE. 



7 



penitent in the Gospel. Contrasting with the light 
effusions of his earlier years the religious poems, 
which he assigns to a later period, he asks : — 

" Did his rich, soul conceive 
And in harmonious holy numbers weave 
A crown of sacred sonnets, fit to adorn 
A dying martyr's brow, or to be worn 
On that blest head of Mary Magdalen 
After she wiped Christ's feet, but not till then. 
Did he — fit for such penitents as she 
And he to use — leave us a Litany 
"Which all devout men love ? " * 

Of the fact I fear there can be little doubt that 
at one time he had led an immoral life. It is indeed 
most unjust to measure the self-accusations of the 
devout servant of God by the common standard of 
human language. The holiest men are the most 
exacting with themselves. Bitter cries of anguish — 
almost of despair— will be wrung from the saint for 
sins which would cost the worldling not one moment 
of sleeplessness and not one prick of remorse. There- 
fore, if they had stood alone, we ought not to have 
laid too great stress on those " tones of pain, thrills 
of contrition, stingings of accusation, wails over 
abiding stains and wounds, and passionate weeping," 
which, in the language of a recent writer,! are 
discernible in Donne's letters and sermons. But 
unhappily his shame is written across his extant 
poems in letters of fire. In some of these there are 



* 'Life,' p. 154. 

f Grosart, Preface to Donne's 4 Poems,' vol. ii. p. xvii. 



s 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



profligacies which it were vain to excuse as purely 
imaginative efforts of the poet, or unworthy con- 
descensions to the base tastes of the age. We are 
driven to the conclusion that they reflect — at least to 
some extent — the sensuality of the man himself. Of 
such an offence I can offer no palliation. I know no 
crime more unpardonable in itself, or more fatal in 
its consequences, than this of prostituting the highest 
gifts of genius to a propaganda of vice and shame, 
this of poisoning the wells of a nation's literature 
and spreading moral death through generations yet 
unborn.* Donne's penitence was intense; he did 
all he could to retrieve the consequences of his sin. 
But he could not undo his work, could not blot out 
the printed page. "In his penitential years," says 
his biographer, " viewing some of those pieces that 
had been loosely — G-od knows, too loosely — scattered 
in his youth, he wished they had been abortive, or so 
short-lived that his own eyes had witnessed their 
funerals." f 

But whatever may have been the sins of his youth 
and early manhood, his married life shows him a 
changed man. His clandestine union brought him 
only sorrows and trials from a worldly point of view ; 



* It must be remembered 
however, that Donne was not 
in many cases responsible for 
the publication of his poems. 
They were published for the 



most part after his death. 

f P. 106 sq. The sentence is 
somewhat differently worded in 
different editions. 



DONNE. 



9 



but lie was an affectionate and true husband, faith- 
ful to his wife during her lifetime, and loyal to her 
memory in a solitary widowhood of many years after 
her death. 

The comparison of Donne with the great African 
Tather was too obvious to escape notice. It is 
touched upon by his earliest critic, his contemporary 
and biographer ; * and it is drawn out by one of 
his latest. Of one of his religious poems the pre- 
sent Archbishop of Dublin writes : " It is the 
genuine cry of one engaged in that most terrible of 
all struggles, wherein, as we are winners or losers, 
we have won all or lost all." Then, adverting to this 
parallel, he adds ; " There was in Donne the same 
tumultuous youth, the same entanglement in youth- 
ful lusts, the same conflict with these, and the same 
final deliverance from them ; and then the same 
passionate and personal grasp of the central truths 
of Christianity, linking itself, as this did, with all 
that he had suffered and all that he had sinned, 
and all through which, by God's grace, lie had 
victoriously struggled." t It is no marvel then to 
find Donne himself quoting St. Augustine more 
frequently than any of the fathers — this "sensible 
and blessed father," this " tender blessed father," 
as he affectionately calls him. 

The bearing of these facts on his preaching will 



* P. 65 sq. I Poetry,' p. 404, quoted by Grosart, 

t ' Household Book of English I Doime's ; Poems,' vol. ii. p. xviii. 



10 



CLASSIC PREACHEES: 



be evident. This moral experience was the comple- 
ment of his intellectual experience. It taught him 
to feel and to absorb into himself, as the other 
taught him to understand and to reason about, the 
doctrine of Christ's atoning grace. What penitence, 
what tears, what merits of his own could wash out 
the stains with which such a life as his was imbrued ? 
It was therefore no pious platitude, no barren 
truism, no phrase of conventional orthodoxy, but 
the profound conviction of a sinful, sorrowing, for- 
given, thanksgiving man, when he speaks of "the 
sovereign balm of our souls, the blood of Christ 
Jesus."* Hear now these lines, which he wrote in 
his later years on a sick-bed, and which often after, 
when "sung to the organ by the choristers of St. 
Paul's," as he himself told a friend, " raised the 
affections of his heart and quickened his graces of 
zeal and gratitude."! 

" Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run, 
And do run still, though still I do deplore ? 
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done ; 

For I have more. 

" Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won 
Others to sin, and made my sin their door ? 
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun 

A year or two, but wallow'd in a score ? 
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done ; 

For I have more. 



* Donne's 'Works,' vol. i. p. 
53, ed. Alford. The references to 
the sermons below are taken 
from this edition, but I have 



collated the quotations, where I 
had the opportunity, with the 
original editions, 
t Walton's < Life.' p. 111. 



DONNE. 



11 



" I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun 

My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ; 
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son 
Shall shine, as He shines now and heretofore ; 
And having done that, Thou hast done ; 

I fear no more." * 

" Simon, I Lave somewhat to say unto thee. . . . 
Tell me which of them will love him most ? Simon 
answered and said, I suppose that he to whom he 
forgave most. And He said nnto him, Thou hast 
rightly judged." .... 

" Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins which are 
many are forgiven ; for she loved much : but to 
whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little."t 

Of Donne's romantic career it has been said, that 
his life is more poetical than his poetry.f We might 
without exaggeration adapt this epigram to his 
preacbiug, and say that hisjifejwas^a^ermon more 
eloquent than all his sermons. 

If, then, I were asked to describe in few words the 
secret of his power as a preacher, I should say that 
it was the contrition and the thanksgiving of the 
penitent acting upon the sensibility of the poet.§ 



* Donne's 1 Poems,' vol. ii. p. [ life of Donne is more interest- 
341 sq. f ed. Grosart). ing than his poetry" ('British 

t St. Luke vii. 40-47. Poets,' vol. iii. p. 73). 

% Campbell, as represented by § Donne seems to have the 
Milman, ' Annals of St. Paul's best right to the title of the poet- 
Cathedral,' p. 324 ; but Camp- J preacher — a designation which 
bell himself, if I have found the j has sometimes been given to an- 
right reference, makes the very other, 
commonplace remark that "the ' 



12 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



Donne remained a layman till his forty-second 
year. He was pressed again and again by friends 
who knew his gifts, to enter Holy Orders, but for 
some years he hesitated. His hesitation was due 
partly to an unwillingness to incur the suspicion 
with his own conscience of being influenced by 
motives of self-interest, but still more by the recol- 
lection of his past life. He himself had long 
repented of the sins of his youth, and " banished 
them his affections : " but though forgiven by God, 
they were not forgotten by men ; and he feared that 
they might bring some censure on himself, or (worse) 
some dishonour on his sacred calling, if he com- 
plied* 

At length he yielded, after much delay, to the 
repeated solicitations of the King himself. In the 
year 1614 he was ordained; and seven years after- 
wards he was promoted to the Deanery of St. Paul's, 
which he held till his death. He died in the 59th 
year of his age, having been sixteen years in orders. 

As a layman he had been notably a poet ; as a 
clergyman he was before all things a preacher. He 
had remarkable gifts as an orator, and he used them 
well. Henceforward preaching was the main business 
of his life. After he had preached a sermon " he 
never gave his eyes rest," we are told, " till he had 
chosen out a new text, and that night cast his 



* Walton's ' Life,' p. 41. 



DONNE. 



^13 



sermon into a form and his text into divisions, and 
the next day he took himself to consult the fathers, 
and so commit his meditations to his memory, which 
was excellent." * On the Saturday he gave himself 
an entire holiday, so as to refresh body and mind, 
" that he might be enabled to do the work of the 
day following not faintly, but with courage and 
cheerfulness." When first ordained, he shunned 
preaching before town congregations. He would 
retire to some country church with a single friend, 
and so try his wings. His first sermon was preached 
in the quiet village of Paddington. But his fame 
grew rapidly ; and he soon took his rank as the most 
powerful preacher of his day in the English Church. 
Others envied him and murmured, says an admirer, 
that, having been called to the vineyard late in the 
day, he received his penny with the first.! 

More than a hundred and fifty of his sermons 
are published. Some of them were preached at 
Lincoln's Inn, where he held the Lectureship ; others 
at St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, of which church he was 
vicar; others at Whitehall, in his turn as Koyal 
Chaplain, or before the Court on special occasions ; 
others, and these the most numerous, at St. Paul's. 
Of this last class a few were delivered at the Cross, 
by special appointment, but the majority within 



* Walton's ' Life,' p. 119. I tached to 4 Poems,' by John 
t Elegy by Mr. R. B., at- I Donne (1669), p. 393. 



14 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES : 



the Cathedral, when year after year, according to 
the rule which is still in force at St. Paul's, he 
preached as Dean at the great festivals of the 
Church, Christmas and Easter and Whitsunday, or 
when he expounded the Psalms assigned to his pre- 
bendal stall, or on various incidental occasions. 

An eminent successor of Donne, the late Dean 
Milman, finds it difficult to " imagine, when he 
surveys the massy folios of Donne's sermons — each 
sermon spreads out over many pages — a vast con- 
gregation in the Cathedral or at Paul's Cross, 
listening not only with patience, but with absorbed 
interest, with unflagging attention, even with delight 
and rapture, to those interminable disquisitions." 
... "It is astonishing to us," he adds, "that he 
should hold a London congregation enthralled, 
unwearied, unsatiated." * 

And yet I do not think that the secret of his 
domination is far to seek. 

" Fervet immensusque rait." 

There is throughout an energy, a glow, an im- 
petuosity, a force as of a torrent, which must have 
swept his hearers onward despite themselves. This 
rapidity of movement is his characteristic feature. 
There are faults in abundance, but there is no flag- 
ging from beginning to end. Even the least manage- 
able subjects yield to his untiring energy. Thus he 



* ' Annals of St. Paul's Cathedral,' p. 328. 



DONNE. 



15 



occupies himself largely with the minute interpre- 
tation of Scriptural passages. This exegesis is very- 
difficult of treatment before a large and miscellaneous 
congregation. But with Donne it is always interest- 
ing. It may be subtle, wire-drawn, fanciful, at 
times ; but it is keen, eager, lively, never pedantic 
or dull. So again, his sermons abound in quota- 
tions from the fathers ; and this burden of patristic 
reference would have crushed any common man. 
But here the quotations are epigrammatic in them- 
selves; they are tersely rendered, they are vigor- 
ously applied, and the reader is never wearied by 
thenv^'Donne is, I think, the most animated of the 
; great Anglican preachers. 

I select two or three examples out of hundreds 
which might be chosen, as exhibiting this eagerness 
of style, lit up by the genius of a poet and heated 
by the zeal of an evangelist. Hear this, for instance : 

" God's house is the house of prayer. It is His 
court of requests. There He receives petitions ; 
there He gives orders upon them. And you come to 
God in His house, as though you came to keep Him 
company, to sit down and talk with Him half an 
hour ; or you come as ambassadors, covered in His 
presence, as though ye came from as great a Prince 
as He. You meet below, and there make your 
bargains for biting, for devouring usury, and then 
you come up hither to prayers, and so make God 
your broker. You rob and spoil and eat His people 



16 



CLASSIC PKEACHEES: 



as bread by extortion and bribery and deceitful 
weights and measures and deluding oaths in buying 
and selling, and then come hither, and so make God 
your receiver and His house a den of thieves . . . 
As if the Son of God were but the son of some lord 
that had been your schoolfellow in your youth, and 
so you continue a boldness to Him ever after ; so 
because you have been brought up with Christ from 
your cradle and catechized in His name, His name 
becomes less reverend unto you ; and Sanctum et ter- 
ribile, holy and reverend, holy and terrible, should 
His name be."* 
Or this : 

" In the earth, in the grave, there is no distinc- 
tion. The angel that shall call us out of that dust 
will not stand to survey who lies naked, who in 
a coffin, who in wood, who in lead, who in a fine, 
who in a coarser sheet; in that one day of the 
resurrection there is not a forenoon for lords to 
rise first and an afternoon for meaner persons to rise 
after. Christ was not whipped to save beggars, and 
crowned with thorns to save kings: He died, He 
suffered all, for all."t 

Or hear this again, which was a favourite passage 
with Coleridge : 

" Death comes equally to us all and makes us all 
equal when it comes. The ashes of an oak in the 



* ' Works,' vol. iii. p. 217 sq. 



t ' Works,' vol. vi. p. 237. 



DONNE. 



17 



chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell me how 
high or how large that was : it tells me not what 
flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men 
it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' 
graves is speechless too ; it says nothing, it dis- 
tinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch 
whom thou wouldst not, as of a prince whom thou 
couldst not, look upon, will trouble thine eyes, if 
the wind blow it thither : and when a whirlwind 
hath blown the dust of the churchyard into the 
church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the 
church into the churchyard, who will undertake 
to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, 'This 
is the patrician, this is the coble flour ; and this is 
the yeomanly, this the plebeian bran ? ' " * 

Or listen again to this most terrible passage of 
all. I do not quote it from any sympathy with this 
mode of appeal to the Christian conscience, but 
merely as illustrating the appalling power of the 
preacher when he puts out his strength. 

" It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the 
living God ; but to fall out of the hands of the living- 
God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our 
imagination." 

" That God should let my soul fall out of His hand 
into a bottomless pit, and roll an unremovable stone 
upon it, and leave it to that wdiich it finds there (and 



[st. james's.] 



* ' Works,' vol. i. p. 241. 



C 



IS 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



it shall find that there which it never imagined till it 
came thither), and never think more of that soul, 
never have more to do with it. That of that pro- 
vidence of God, that studies the life of every weed 
and worm and ant and spider and toad and viper, 
there should never, never any beam flow out upon 
me ; that that God who looked upon me when I was 
nothing, and called me when I was not, as though I 
had been, out of the womb and depth of darkness, 
will not look upon me now, when, though a miser- 
able and a banished and a damned creature, yet I 
am His creature still, and contribute something to 
His glory, even in my damnation ; that that God 
who hath often looked upon me in my foulest un- 
cleanness and when I had shut out the eye of the 
day, the sun, and the eye of the night, the taper, 
and the eyes of all the world, with curtains and 
windows and doors, did yet see me, and see me in 
mercy, by making me see that He saw me, and 
sometimes brought me to a present remorse and (for 
that time) to a forbearing of that sin, should so turn 
Himself from me to His glorious saints and angels, 
as that no saint nor angel nor Jesus Christ Himself 
should ever pray Him to look towards me, never 
remember Him that such a soul there is; that that 
God who hath so often said to my soul Quare 
morieris ? 6 Why wilt thou die ? ' and so often sworn 
to my soul Vivit Dominus, 'As the Lord liveth, I would 
not have thee die but live,' will neither let me die 



DONNE. 



19 



nor let roe live, but die an everlasting life and live 
an everlasting death; that that God who when He 
could not get into me by standing and knocking, by 
His ordinary means of entering, by His word, His 
mercies, hath applied His judgments, and hath shaked 
the house, this body, with agues and palsies, and 
set this house on fire with fevers and calentures, 
and frighted the master of the house, my soul, 
with horrors and heavy apprehensions, and so made 
an entrance into me ; that that God should frustrate 
all His own purposes and practices upon me, and 
leave me and cast me away, as though I had cost 
Him nothing ; that this God at last should let this 
soul go away as a smoke, as a vapour, as a bubble, 
and that then this soul cannot be a smoke, a vapour, 
nor a bubble, but must lie in darkness as long as the 
Lord of light is light itself, and never spark of that 
light reach to my soul. . . ." * 

Listen to such words as I have read ; and to com- 
plete the effect summon up in imagination the ap- 
pearance and manner of the preacher. Recall him 
as he is seen in the portrait attributed to Vandyck, 
— the keen, importuning, "melting eye," J the thin, 
worn features, the poetic cast of expression, half 
pensive, half gracious. Add to this the sweet 
tones of his voice and the "'speaking action,"! 

* 1 Works,' vol. iii. p. 386 sq. tacked to ' Poems,' by Jokn 
t Walton's ' Life,' p. 150. Donne (1G69), p. 387. 
J Elegy by Mr. Mayne, at- 

c 2 



20 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



which is described by eye-witnesses as more elo- 
quent than the words of others, and you will 
cease to wonder at the thraldom in which he held 
his audience. "A preacher in earnest," writes 
Walton, " weeping sometimes for his auditory, some- 
times with them : always preaching to himself ; like 
an angel from a cloud but in none ; carrying some, 
as St. Paul was, to heaven in holy raptures, and en- 
ticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend 
their lives : here picturing a vice so as to make it 
ugly to those who practised it, and a virtue so as to 
make it beloved even by those that loved it not . . ."* 
Indeed we cannot doubt that he himself was alive 
to that feeling, which he ascribes to the " blessed 
fathers'' when preaching, "a holy delight to be 
heard, and to be heard with delight." f 

Donne's sermons are not faultless models of pulpit 
oratory. From this point of view they cannot be 
studied as the sermons of the great French preachers 
may be studied. Under the circumstances, this was 
almost an impossibility. Preaching his hour's sermon 
once or twice weekly, he had not time to arrange and 
re-arrange, to prune, to polish, to elaborate. As it is, 
we marvel at the profusion of learning, the rich- 
ness of ideas and imagery, the abundance in all kinds, 
poured out by a preacher who thus lived, as it were, 
from hand to mouth. 



* 4 Life,' p. 69. 



t ' Works,' vol. i. p. 98. 



DONNE. 



21 



Moreover, the taste of the age for fantastic imagery, 
for subtle disquisition, for affectations of language 
and of thought, exercised a ; fascination oyer him. 
Yet even here he is elevated above himself and his 
time by his subject. There is still far too much of 
that conceit of language, of that subtlety of associa- 
tion, of that " sport with ideas," which has been con- 
demned in his verse compositions ; but, compared 
with his poems, his sermons are freedom and sim- 
plicity itself. And, whenever his theme rises, he 
rises too ; and then in the giant strength of an 
earnest conviction he bursts these green withes which 
a fantastic age has bound about him, as the thread 
of tow snaps at the touch of fire. Xothing can be 
more direct or more real than his eager, impetuous 
eloquence, when he speaks of God, of redemption, of 
heaven, of the sinfulness of human sin, of the bounti- 
fulness of Divine Love. 

At such moments he is quite the most modern of 
our older Anglican divines. He speaks directly to 
our time, because he speaks to all times. If it be 
the special aim of the preacher to convince of sin 
and of righteousness and of judgment, then Donne 
deserves to be reckoned the first of our Classic 
preachers. "We may find elsewhere more skilful 
arrangement, more careful oratory, more accurate 
exegesis, more profuse illustration ; but here is the 
light which flashes and the fire which burns. 

Donne's learning was enormous ; and yet his 



22 



CLASSIC PEEACHEKS: 



sermons probably owe more to his knowledge of men 
than to his knowledge of books. The penitent is too 
apt to shrink into the recluse. Donne never yielded 
to this temptation. He himself thus rebukes the 
mistaken extravagance of penitence: "When men 
have lived long from God, they never think they 
come near enough to Him, except they go beyond 
Him." * No contrition was more intense than his ; 
but he did not think to prove its reality by cutting 
himself off from the former interests and associations 
of his life. He had been a man of the world before ; 
and he did not cease to be a man in the world now. 
" Beloved," he says — this term " beloved " is his 
favourite mode of address — " Beloved, salvation itself 
being so often presented to us in the names of glory 
and of joy, we cannot think that the way to that 
glory is a sordid life affected here, an obscure, a 
beggarly, a negligent abandoning of all ways of pre- 
ferment or riches or estimation in this world, for 
the glory of heaven shines down in these beams 
hither. ... As God loves a cheerful giver, so He 
loves a cheerful taker that takes hold of His mercies 
and His comforts with a cheerful heart."! This 
healthy, vigorous good sense is the more admirable 
in Donne, because it is wedded to an intense and 
passionate devotion. 

I wish that time would allow me to multiply 



* 'Works,' vol. ii. p. 31. 



t lb., vol. ii. p. 142. 



DONNE. 



23 



examples of his lively imagination flashing out 
in practical maxims and lighting up the common 
things of life ; as for instance, where he pictures 
the general sense of insecurity on the death of Eliza- 
beth : " Every one of you in the city were running 
up and down like ants with their eggs bigger than 
themselves, every man with his bags, to seek where 
to hide them safely. " * Or where he enforces the 
necessity of watchfulness against minor tempta- 
tions: "As men that rob houses thrust in a child 
at the window, and he opens greater doors for 
them, so lesser sins make way for greater." f Or 
when he describes the little effect of preaching 
on the heartless listener : <£ He hears but the logic 
or the rhetoric or the ethic or the poetry of the 
sermon, but the sermon of the sermon he hears 
not." X Of such pithy sayings Donne's sermons 
are an inexhaustible storehouse, in which I would 
gladly linger; but I must hasten on to speak of one 
other feature before drawing to a close. Irony is a 
powerful instrument in the preacher's hands, if he 
knows how to wield it ; otherwise it were better left 
alone. The irony of Donne is piercing. Hear the 
withering scorn which he pours on those who think 
to condone sinful living by a posthumous bequest : 
" We hide our sins in His house by hypocrisy all our 
lives, and we hide them at our deaths, perchance, 



* 1 Works,' vi. p. 137. f lb., vol. ii. p. 556. % vol. i. p. 72. 



24 



CLASSIC PEEACHERS: 



with a hospital. And truly we had need do so ; when 
we have impoverished God in His children by our 
extortions, and wounded Him and lamed Him in 
them by our oppressions, we had need to provide God 
an hospital."* Or hear this again, on the criticism 
of sermons : " Because God calls preaching foolish- 
ness, you take God at His word and think preaching 
a thing under you. Hence it is that you take so 
much liberty in censuring and comparing preacher 
and preacher." f And lastly, observe the profound 
pathos and awe which is veiled under the apparent 
recklessness of these daring words : " At how cheap 
a price was Christ tumbled up and down in this 
world ! It does almost take off our pious scorn of 
the low price at which Judas sold Him, to consider 
that His Father sold Him to the world for nothing."J 

For preaching Donne lived ; and in preaching he 
died. He rose from a sick bed and came to London 
to take his customary sermon at Whitehall on the 
first Friday in' Lent. Those who saw him in the 
pulpit, says Walton quaintly,§ must "have asked 
that question in Ezekiel, 4 Do these bones live?"' 
The sermon was felt to be the swan's dying strain. 
Death was written in his wan and wasted features, 
and spoke through his faint and hollow voice. 

The subject was in harmony with the circum- 
stances. He took as his text the passage in the 



* « Works,' vol. ii. p. 555. 
t lb., vol. ii. p. 219. 



% lb., vol. i. p. 61. 
§ 4 Life,' p. 135 sq. 



DONNE. 



25 



Psalms, " Unto God the Lord belong the issues of 
death." His hearers said at the time that "Dr. 
Donne had preached his own funeral sermon." 

The sermon is published. It betrays in part a 
diminution of his wonted fire and animation. We 
seem to see the preacher struggling painfully with 
his malady. But yet it is remarkable. The theme 
and the circumstances alike invest it with a peculiar 
solemnity ; and there are flashes of the poet-preacher 
still. 

" This whole world," he says, " is but a universal 
churchyard, but one common grave: and the life 
and motion that the greatest persons have in it is 
but as the shaking of buried bodies in their graves 
by an earthquake."* 

"The worm is spread under thee, and the worm 
covers thee. There is the mats and carpet that lie 
under, and there is the state and the canopy that, 
hangs over the greatest of the sons of meu."t 

" The tree lies as it falls, it is true, but yet it is 
not the last stroke that fells the tree, nor the last 
word nor the last gasp that qualifies the man." { 

Hear now the closing words, and you will not be 
at a loss to conceive the profound impression which 
they must have left on his hearers, as the dying 
utterance of a dying man. 

" There we leave you in that blessed dependency, 



* 'Works,' vol. vi. p. 283. f Ib -> P- 288. % lh -> P- 290- 



26 



CLASSIC PKEACHERS. 



to hang upon Him that hangs upon the Cross. There 
bathe in His tears, there suck at His wounds, and lie 
down in peace in His grave, till He vouchsafes you 
a resurrection and an ascension into that kingdom 
which He hath purchased for you with the ines- 
timable price of His incorruptible blood. Amen." 

Amen it was. He had prayed that he might die 
in the pulpit, or (if not this) that he might die of 
the pulpit ; and his prayer was granted. From this 
sickness he never recovered ; the effort hastened his 
dissolution ; and, after lingering on a few weeks, he 
died on the last day of March, 1631. 

This study of Donne as a preacher will be fitly 
closed with the last stanza from his poem entitled, 
' Hymn to God, my God, in my sickness,' which 
sums up the broad lesson of his life and teaching. 

" So in His purple wrapped, receive me, Lord ; 
By these His thorns give me His other crown ; 
And as to others' souls I preached Thy Word, 
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own : 
Therefore, that He may raise, the Lord throivs down."i 



* ' Works/ vol. vi. p. 298. 



t ' Poems/ vol. ii. p. 340. 



BARKOW. 



THE EXHAUSTIVE PEEACHER. 



" But godliness is profitable unto all things." — 1 Tim. iv. 8. 



Hospital Sermons an old institution — A Spital Sermon in 1671 — 
Sketch of the Preacher, Dr. Barrow — His studies — His life — 
Character of his preaching — His combativeness — His exliaus- 
tiveness — Advantage of his methods — His objects — His account 
of his own times — His sturdy Morality — Its foundation in his 
Theology — Moral and Intellectual truth the natural food of the 
soul— His sermons chiefly devoted to practical duties — Character 
of his doctrinal Sermons — Deficiency of his theology — His bold 
appeal to reason — Its strength and its weakness — Comparison 
with our own times — Value of his example. 

One of my duties on this occasion* is to invite con- 
tributions to the Fund collected throughout London 
this day for the Hospitals of the Metropolis, and my 
other duty suggests an interesting historical parallel. 
The idea of a special appeal once a year for all the 
Hospitals is, in substance at all events, some cen- 
turies old. In some fields near Bethnal Green 
there existed in old times a Priory and Hospital, 



* Hospital Sunday, June 17, 1877. 



28 



CLASSIC PREACHEKS : 



dedicated to the honour of our Lord and the Virgin 
Mary, and commonly called St. Mary Spital. In 
the churchyard of the Priory, now Spital Square, 
was in old times a pulpit-cross, something like that 
which was once in St. Paul's Churchyard ; and here 
originally were preached every year what were known 
as the Spital, or Hospital, Sermons. It is said to 
have been * for a long time a custom on Good 
Friday, in the afternoon, for some learned man, by 
appointment of the Prelates, to preach a sermon 
at Paul's Cross, treating of Christ's passion. On 
the three next Easter holydays, other learned men, 
by a like appointment, used to preach in the after- 
noon at the said Spital on the Article of Christ's 
resurrection ; and then on the Sunday after Easter, 
before noon, another learned man at Paul's Cross 
was to make rehearsal of these four sermons, either 
commending or reproving, as was thought con- 
venient; and he was then to make a sermon him- 
self, which in all were five sermons in one. At 
all these sermons the Lord Mayor, with his brethren 
the aldermen, were accustomed to be present. The 
pulpit was broken down in the Grand Eebellion, 
but the sermons were continued, with the old name 
of the Spital Sermons, at St. Bride's and elsewhere, 
and they retained some associations connected with 
the old Hospital. In 1740 we have Bishop Butler 

* Peter Cunningham's 'Handbook of London,' 1850, p. 463; 
Maitland's ' London,' 1756, pp. 799, 800. 



BAEEOW. 



29 



preaching one of them, and the institutions for 
which he preached are specified as Christ's Hospital, 
for children; St. Bartholomew's and St. Thomas's 
Hospitals, for the wounded, maimed, sick, and dis- 
eased ; Bridewell, for the vagrant and other indigent 
and miserable people; Bethlehem, for distracted 
men and women ; and the London Workhouse in 
Bishopsgate Street. The word Hospital was used 
in the width of its old signification, but to all intents 
and purposes this was a Hospital day. 

It seems a pity, if such a suggestion may be per- 
mitted, that the new institution of Hospital Sunday 
has not been affiliated on this old custom. But to 
pass to my other subject. On Wednesday, in Easter 
w T eek, in the year 1671, a very remarkable sermon 
was preached at the Spital, " On the Duty and 
Eeward of Bounty to the Poor." There is a tra- 
dition that it occupied three hours and a half in de- 
livery ; but since the Court of Aldermen desired the 
Preacher to print his sermon, " with what farther he 
had prepared to deliver at that time;" and since the 
sermon as now printed occupies not more than ninety- 
four octavo pages, it is thought there may be some 
exaggeration in this tradition. The Preacher is said 
to have begun to be weary with standing so long ; 
but it is not recorded that there was any weariness 
on the part of the audience. On the contrary, as we 
have seen, having heard a good deal, they desired 
to read more; and no w r onder, for the sermon 



30 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES! 



is almost an exhaustive treatise on the subject. 
It is on the text, "He hath dispersed, he hath 
given to the poor, his righteousness endureth for 
ever, his horn shall be exalted with honour." 
After some observations on the comprehensiveness 
of the liberality thus described, the preacher goes 
on, as he says, to propound several considerations 
" whereby the plain reasonableness, the great weight, 
the high worth and excellency of this duty, together 
with its strict connection with other principal 
duties of piety, will appear." * 

First, he observes that there is no sort of duty more 
expressly commanded in Scripture, so much so that 
righteousness and mercifulness are almost inter- 
changeable terms ; Charity, in fact, being the main 
point of religion, and mercy and bounty the chief 
parts of Charity. He proceeds to discuss the obliga- 
tions to this virtue arising from our relation to God, 
from our relation to the poor themselves, from the cha- 
racter and origin of wealth, and the relative positions 
of the rich and the poor. It is characteristic of him 
that, preaching to a rich audience, himself a staunch 
Cavalier and a champion of established order, he does 
not hesitate to declare that, in the existing degree, the 
differences of wealth and poverty are not natural. It 
was sin, he exclaims, which " begot these ingrossings 

* Works of Isaac Barrow, D.D. Edited by the Eev. A. Napier, 
Cambridge, 1859. Vol. i. p. 1 sqq. All other references to Barrow's 
works are made to this edition. 



BAEEOW. 



and enclosures of things ; it forged those two small 
pestilent words, meum and tuum" and we are bound in 
some measure to redress the balance thus disturbed. 
But so far as the distinctions of rich and poor are 
divinely appointed, it is in order that a charitable 
intercourse of mutual gratitude and obligation should 
be established between them. The poor, moreover, 
have the special distinction of representing the form 
assumed by our Saviour Himself. " The greatest 
princes and potentates in the w r orld," exclaims the 
Preacher, " the most wealthy and haughty of us all, 
but for one poor beggar had been irrecoverably 
miserable;" and "if we will do poverty right, we 
must rather for His dear sake and memory defer 
an especial respect and veneration thereto." All 
these points are elaborated in detail, and vigorously 
enforced with quotations and illustrations. The 
Preacher pursues every excuse for uncharitableness 
into its hiding-place, and drags them forth one by 
one. A Christian, in a word, is one who has pledged 
himself to imitate the benign and charitable Son 
of God, and " a Christian niggard plainly is no 
Christian, but a blemish, a reproach, and a scandal 
to that honourable name." Finally, he quotes ex- 
amples of liberality, not omitting that of the City 
of London itself, and briefly recounts the honours 
which the text attaches to bountifulness. 

Such a recital of the obligations, the reasons, and 
the blessings of Charity ought not to be without its 



32 



CLASSIC PKEACHEKS: 



effect on our liberality this afternoon ; and, at all 
events, it may afford some idea of one of the chief 
characteristics of the Preacher in question. But 
before dwelling on these characteristics, let us en- 
deavour to realise the man himself. He was a man 
who, in several respects, ought to command especial 
interest at this time. Though this was the first 
sermon he ever printed, and he was but forty years 
of age, he had long held a very distinguished position 
at Cambridge and was one of the King's Chaplains. 
Twenty-five years before he had entered Trinity 
College, Cambridge, and ever since then, with 
the sole interval of a year or two spent in 
travel, Cambridge had been his home. During 
that time he had devoted himself with astonishing 
industry, vigour, and success to almost every study 
which the University offered. The period was the 
very turning-point in the history of that great 
University. Within the space of Dr. Barrow's 
career — for that was the name of the Preacher — 
had that bent been given to it which has since 
rendered it in a peculiar degree the home of the 
mathematical and physical sciences. It was just 
at this moment, in the middle of the seventeenth 
century, that the new experimental philosophy, to 
which Lord Bacon, himself a Cambridge man, had 
given so momentous an impulse, began decisively to 
assert its predominance. When Barrow entered Cam- 
bridge, no branch of philosophical science except 



BARROW. 



33 



Medicine was represented by a Professor ; there was 
only one lecture in Mathematics, and these were 
so elementary that Barrow describes it as a great 
achievement " that men had ceased to tremble at 
the name of Euclid, and had even triumphed over 
the mysteries of Algebra." But in 1663 the Lu- 
casian Professorship of Mathematics was founded. 
Barrow became the first Professor ; and one year 
before he preached this Spital Sermon he had 
resigned this Professorship, and had been succeeded 
by one of his own pupils, whose name was Isaac 
Newton. During the time he held the Professor- 
ship he had approached to the very verge of one of 
Newton's greatest mathematical discoveries; and had 
he given his life to the subject, the master might 
have been only second to the pupil. But Barrow's 
energy could not be confined to one subject. Three 
years before his appointment to the Mathematical 
Chair he had been elected to the Professorship of 
Greek ; and he was confessedly one of the first 
Greek and Latin scholars of the day. But this was 
far from all. He was intensely interested in the 
rising experimental sciences, and studied with great 
success anatomy, botany and chemistry. Had he 
been unbiassed, he might even have made Medicine 
his profession, but he held one of those preferments, 
so obnoxious to modern ideas, now known as clerical 
fellowships ; and on the eve of their probable aboli- 
tion let it be remembered to their credit that, in 
[st. james's.] D 



34 CLASSIC PREACHEES : 

this instance at least, if they spoilt a great mathe- 
matician or natural philosopher, they did at least 
foster a great divine. 

Barrow felt that his oath bound him to make 
Divinity the end of his studies. It would seem that 
about the time his Spital Sermon was preached, he 
had finally devoted himself to this career ; and in 
the following year Charles II. appointed him to the 
Mastership of Trinity College, saying that he gave 
it to the best scholar in England. He held the post 
only five years, dying in 1677, in his forty-seventh 
year, after preaching the only other Sermon which 
he lived to prepare for publication, that delivered 
at the Guildhall on Good Friday, 1677, on the 
Passion of our Blessed Saviour. One or two more 
touches will complete his portraiture sufficiency for 
our purpose. He was the son of a wealthy citizen, 
who suffered much for his adherence to the cause of 
the King; and when the authority of the Church 
and the King was supplanted at Cambridge by 
Parliamentary Commissioners, Barrow distinguished 
himself as an undergraduate by his bold, though 
not obtrusive, adherence to the old cause. As a boy 
at the Charterhouse he was chiefly distinguished 
by his pugnacity ; but as the troubles of the time 
began, he settled down to serious and diligent study. 
Lastly, as another point which should command 
attention for him at the present moment, during his 
travels he spent a year at Constantinople, and he 



BABEOW. 



35 



has left an account of the Turks and their religion, 
in prose * and verse, f which has been recently said 
to afford, even now, the best short account of the 
subject existing.! Unfortunately both these pieces 
are in Latin; but could I trouble you with a 
quotation, § you would see that his impressions of 
the Turks and their religion do not differ much from 
those which are most current at this hour. 

Such, however, was the man who, in a Spital 
Sermon of the year 1671, poured on the heads of 
the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of 
London that flood of discussion, exhortation, denun- 
ciation, argument, encouragement, which I just now 
described. There is, perhaps, something in it which 
recalls the early character of the boy. There is a 
certain pugnacity about the form of the argument 
which suggests that the old spirit was still alive in 
him. Throughout the Sermon he seems to have 
before him the character whom he describes as " the 
Christian niggard ; " and he appears to take a de- 
light in demolishing this monster with as many and 
as vigorous blows as his own strength and the en- 



* ' Works,' vol. ix. p. 386. t Ibid., p. 481. 

% 1 Quarterly Eeview,' October 1869. 

§ " Sseva superstitio, bellisque creata ciendis, 
Indulgens irse, pronseque effusa remittens 
Lora voluptati, Martis siirml improba fautrix 
Et Veneris, votis ac moribus apta feriuis, 
Barbara corripuit subita prsecordia flamina." 

De Belifjione Turcica, 'AicecpoAov, 11. 16-20. 



36 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



durance of his audience will allow him to inflict. 
Almost all his sermons are marked by something 
of this combative character — a disposition fostered 
probably by the fierce and fiery temper of the 
times in which he had been trained. It assumes, 
however, no mere contentious form, but passes into 
a noble and burning indignation against vices, weak- 
nesses, follies, and stupidities of all kinds. It may 
be owned, perhaps, he makes sometimes too little 
difference between these several sources of human 
error ; and few things seem more to vex his soul 
than the perverseness and stupidity of mankind. 
His own nature is so vigorous, healthy, and well 
balanced, that he can make little allowance for 
feebler souls. Whatever he touches becomes as 
clear and definite to him as the mathematical 
problems he had worked out with Isaac Newton. 
Every sermon is like the demonstration of a 
theorem. It seems to conclude with a quod erat 
probandum, " which was to be proved," and to 
develop into a problem, quod est faciendum, 
"which must be done." There is no escaping 
from this vigorous athlete, this master of the whole 
science of logical and rhetorical attack and defence. 
He pursues his antagonist into every corner of 
the ground, allows him, with the utmost fairness, 
to avail himself of all conceivable defences, and 
breaks them all down, one after the other, with 
irresistible, and sometimes, it may be, only too 



BAKKOW. 



37 



numerous blows. He has no idea of giving quarter 
in intellectual warfare. We are concerned with him 
mainly as a Preacher, and his treatise, therefore, on 
the Pope's Supremacy * can only be referred to by 
way of illustration. But it is the finest example of 
this " ability to contend/' as Bacon calls it, to be found 
in his works ; and judging by what is daily passing 
around us, it is not soon likely to become obsolete. 
He shows that the Pope's plea of Supremacy involves 
at least seven distinct suppositions : — that St. Peter, 
by our Lord's appointment, had a primacy over the 
Apostles; that this primacy was not personal but 
derivable to his successors ; that St. Peter was Bishop 
of Borne, and that he continued so till his decease ; 
that the Bishops of Kome by Divine institution have 
a universal supremacy and jurisdiction over the 
Church; that, in fact, since St. Peter's time, they 
have continually enjoyed and exercised this power ; 
and lastly, that it is indefectible and unchangeable. 
The mere statement of this chain of suppositions is 
in itself a crushing argument ; but Barrow pursues 
each one of them into all its ramifications with the 
utmost vigour and vehemence and with the most 
ample learning, until the field within the limit of his 
survey seems completely cleared of hostile forces. 
The same method, in varying degrees, is constantly 
reflected in his sermons, and he emerges from every 



* 1 Works,' vol. viii. 



38 



CLASSIC preachers: 



one of them a victor over some form of sin or error 
with which he has been in mortal combat. 

But we should do him great injustice, as my 
sketch of his Spital Sermon will, I hope, have 
shown, if we regarded this as more than his first 
aspect as a preacher. This, if I may so express it, 
is in great measure the natural man, and in the 
preacher we have the man of grace and of piety 
overpowering it, and moulding natural tendencies to 
loftier purposes. In the first place, that minuteness 
of detail, that exhaustiveness, as Charles II. cha- 
racterised it, into which his dialectical habits led 
him, produced a new and more gracious effect when 
applied to the illustration of moral and spiritual truth. 
There are two great types of mind, with two distinct 
methods of dealing with such subjects. The one 
seizes some great truth, which it kindles into a new 
illumination, and then leaves all the details of fact 
and theory to be discerned by this central light. 
The other goes through these details themselves, 
examines them one by one, and gradually builds up 
with them a harmonious whole. Barrow's mind is 
of the latter cast. Every sermon, like the one I 
have analysed, is exhaustive in the sense of being 
a comprehensive discussion of all the component 
parts of his subject. He goes through them all, 
one by one, step by step, and places each in 
its right position. The process, it must be owned, 
is sometimes tedious, but it must also be allowed 



BARROW. 



that the result in the hands of a strong and 
laborious workman like Barrow is vastly impres- 
sive. "When the quarry is exhausted, and all 
the stones are in their appointed places, we have 
a massive and a solid edifice before us, com- 
plete from its foundations to its roof, and strongly 
compacted in every part. The essential merit of 
this process consists in the completeness and ex- 
haustiveness with which it is carried into effect, and 
with Barrow the workmanship is in this respect of 
the very highest excellence. 

There are occasions, indeed, when such a method 
necessarily fails. It is hard to imagine an audience, 
even in former days, really listening to even one 
half of the full development of the argument of 
the Spital Sermon. Yet to any one who will have 
the patience to peruse the discourse as a whole, and 
to contemplate it as a whole, it has a force which 
could hardly be otherwise exerted. It is when 
we see that a virtue like that of bountifulness 
has all these various bearings — how it touches 
our relations to God, to our neighbour, to the 
poor, to ourselves, to our peace of mind and to 
our welfare here and hereafter — it is only when 
we contemplate a virtue in all this manifold 
extent of its operations that we can be fully 
impressed by all its practical importance. Barrow 
loves to dwell on details, not as details, but as 
essential to the full production of the total effect. 



40 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



" In such manner," for instance, he says in one place,* 
"ought we diligently to survey and judiciously to 
estimate the effects of Divine beneficence, examin- 
ing every part, and descanting upon every circum- 
stance thereof: like those that contemplate some 
rare beauty, or some excellent picture ; some com- 
mending the exact proportions, some the graceful 
features, some the lively colours discernible therein." 
In this manner, as you will have observed, 
does Barrow in his Spital Sermon, and in many 
others, fill up all the lights and shades, and 
depict all the varying colours of the subject he is 
portraying ; until bit by bit, under his patient 
and steady hand, its great and impressive unity 
overshadows us. Sometimes, indeed, as we have 
seen, he goes far beyond the reach of the powers 
of attention in modern congregations ; yet it must 
also, I think, be allowed that, when this method 
is kept within reasonable limits, we ought not to 
be so impatient of it as we are in these days 
apt to be. In every other form of formal public 
lecture we not only tolerate, but we even demand a 
length which would not be incompatible with the 
delivery of many among Barrow's Sermons. If 
some law of Nature is to be expounded at the Koyal 
Institution, nobody complains that the Lecturer 
occupies the better part of an hour ; and the laws 
and relations of our moral nature are certainly 



* Sermon " On the Duty of Thanksgiving." ' Works,' vol. i. p. 347. 



BAEKOW. 



41 



not less intricate, nor less various, than those of the 
physical world. Barrow, one might sometimes think, 
carries into his theological and moral demonstrations 
something of the character of the experimental philo- 
sopher. He is laying bare all the consequences and 
the connections of moral laws ; and he has a right 
to demand some patience from his audience. At all 
events, if they give it, they are abundantly repaid ; 
and if from such a discourse as the Spital Sermon a 
man is simply impressed with the complexity, the 
intricacy, the multitude and the magnitude of moral 
and spiritual influences, in that impression alone he 
has acquired a conviction which it would be difficult 
otherwise to convey to him. 

Such were Barrow's methods. But as with all 
really able men, they were strictly subordinated to his 
objects ; and what, let us next ask, were the purposes 
to which this strong, clear-sighted, and vehement 
mind, stored with all the old and all the new learning, 
devoted itself in the full force of its manhood ? To 
appreciate the answer to that question, it is necessary 
to bear in mind the circumstances of the nation at 
the time when Barrow, under a sense of duty, devoted 
himself to theology. He himself, in a sermon on the 
King's hap, y return,* preached, however, sixteen 
years after that event, gives a melancholy description 
of his times — how, " from dissensions in opinion, 
violent factions and feuds were raging, the hearts of 



* ' Works,' vol. i. p. 404. 



42 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES : 



men boiling with fierce animosities . . . beyond any 
hopes or visible means of reconcilement ; " how " the 
fences of discipline were cast down," "the dread 
of authority exceedingly abated," while turbulent, 
malicious and crafty spirits were watching for oc- 
casions to subvert the Church and disturb the State. 
He denounces " the prodigious growth of atheism, 
infidelity, and profaneness ; the rife practice of all 
impieties, iniquities, and impurities;" "the extreme 
dissoluteness in manners . . . the great stupidity 
and coldness of people as to all concerns of religion ; " 
and meanwhile " the world about us in combustion, 
cruel wars raging everywhere, and Christendom 
weltering in blood." It must be owned this is hardly 
an overdrawn description of the position of a great 
part of English society and of the world at large in 
the reign of Charles II., towards the days of the 
Popish Plot, amidst the wars of Louis XIV., and 
when we ourselves seemed drifting towards another 
religious and civil war. Eemembering that all these 
disturbances and confusions, and above all the civil 
strife which had stained the country with blood, had 
been set on foot in the name of religion, often in 
the name of some exclusive theological theory, and 
that different sects had torn the country to pieces 
for the sake of schemes of ecclesiastical discipline, 
it was not wonderful if for the moment a strong tide 
seemed to set towards distrust of all religion, reck- 
lessness of morals, and mere selfishness. 



BARROW. 



43 



But Barrow had been brought up under sober and 
religious influences, and throughout his life at the 
University he exhibited a singular steadiness of pious 
and conscientious convictions. We have no means 
of tracing the full course of his thoughts, but froni 
the moment that he comes before us, we find him 
possessed with a deep and settled persuasion that 
in the great and broad truths of religion lie the 
foundations of morality, while in morality lie the 
foundations of individual and national welfare. He 
sets himself, accordingly, with all the strength of one 
of the most resolute natures, to bring these cardinal 
principles home to the men of his day, and to 
vindicate once more the simple and practical, but 
none the less potent, influence inherent in the great 
elementary truths of the Christian religion. He 
leaves on one side, or brushes away, the thorny con- 
troversies with which religion has been overlaid : he 
can hardly speak respectfully of even the grand 
controversy of the Keformation respect ing justification 
by faith ; and he goes straight to the broad facts of 
Christian belief and moral duty. He starts, indeed, 
with the most vivid and overpowering realisation 
of God. The Divine Being is not to him a mere 
theological principle assumed on grounds of science, 
or believed on mere authority. God, in his own 
words, is " the most intelligible object " of our minds, 
meaning that "we are capable of knowing more, 
more clearly, more assuredly of God than of any 



44, classic preachers: 

other, yea, than of all other things."* These are not 
careless expressions. He supports them in one of 
his finest arguments, in a sermon entitled,! " An 
adequate knowledge of God attainable by man." 
Of other objects, he says, we can perceive very little, 
"only some faint colours, some superficial shapes, 
some dull objects ; while their intrinsic nature, their 
chief radical properties remain enclosed and debarred 
from our sight in an inaccessible darkness. But of 
God we may apprehend (in some degree according 
to our natural capacity) His most essential attri- 
butes ; tcl fjueyaXela iov <deov, His (magnificences) 
great things; His infinite goodness, wisdom and 
power." " We cannot," he exclaims, " without shut- 
ting our eyes, exclude that light of Divine glory 
which fills and illustrates the world ; without stopping 
our ears we cannot but hear that universal shout 
(that real harmony of the spheres) which all creatures 
in heaven and earth consent in utterance to his 
praise." He proceeds to illustrate this idea in a 
magnificent image, which could only have occurred 
to a great theologian who was also a real man of 
science. " What the sun is," he says, "in the visible 
world, most visible himself, and imparting visibility 
to all other things," so is God in the intelligible 
world ; " and as whatever we behold with our bodily 
eyes, 'tis not so much the thing itself which we see, 



* 4 Works,' vol. iv. pp. 477-8 



t Ibid., vol. iv. pp. 461-491. 



BAKROW. 



45 



as an emanation from the sun ; an imperfect image, 
as it were, of him reflected from the specular surface 
of some body, in itself opaque and invisible ; a 
mere draught of the sun; stained by the colours 
and fashioned by the shape of that body ; so is God 
in the world of things intelligible: most brightly 
radiant to our intellectual eyes; (Re is light, and 
in Him there is no tend of darkness), He is Himself 
most intelligible, and communicates intelligibility 
to all other tilings : With Thee, saith David, is the 
fountain of life; in Thy light shall we see light. 'Tis 
by His light that all things are illuminated ; every 
creature is, as it were, speculum Dei; whatever we 
discern in them is but some indirect glimpse of His 
light, some faint shadow of His power and perfection : 
and in this sense, Jupiter est quodcunque vides" 

Barrow does not often rise to this height, nor 
indeed, does any one else ; but this faith in God, 
almost amounting to an abiding vision, is combined 
in Barrow's mind with a conviction, all the more 
deep and important because apparently spontaneous 
and natural to him, that our point of contact with 
the Divine nature is to be found in the pursuit of 
all truth, no matter of what kind, but above all 
in the truth of the conscience and in the everyday 
duties of morality. " Truth," he says, " is the natural 
food of our soul, towards which it hath a greedy 
appetite ;" and all knowledge, accordingly, all the 
sciences of which he was such a master, are claimed 



46 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



by him as the soul's fitting endowments. But it is 
in moral truth that he sees the most immediate 
participation of the Divine nature. In more than 
one place he uses the term "conscience" as practically 
equivalent to religion or godliness ; and in number- 
less places he expresses the main object of religion 
to be the encouragement and restoration among us 
of the ordinary virtues of morality. Omitting many 
passages, it will be sufficient to quote one which 
brings into strong contrast the character of the reli- 
gion for which he was contending and that which 
had brought so much misery on the nation. " Re- 
ligion," he says, in one of his early University 
Sermons,* " consisteth not in fair profession and 
glorious pretences, but in real practice; not in a 
pretentious adherence to any sect or party, but in a 
sincere love of goodness, and dislike of naughtiness, 
wherever discovering itself . . . not in a nice ortho- 
doxy . . . but in a sincere love of truth, in a hearty 
approbation of, and compliance with, the doctrines 
fundamentally good, and necessary to be believed ; 
not in harsh censuring and virulently inveighing 
against others, but in carefully amending our own 
ways ; . . . not in a furious zeal for or against trivial 
circumstances, but in a conscionable practising the 
substantial parts of religion ... in a word, Religion 
consists in nothing else but doing what becomes our 



* 'Works,' vol. i. p. 171. 



BABBOW. 



47 



relation to God, in a conformity or similitude to His 
nature, and in a willing obedience to His holy will." 
" It was the design of Divine goodness," as he else- 
where expresses himself, " in sending our Saviour, to 
render us good and happy, to deliver us from sin and 
misery, to instruct us in the knowledge, and to habi- 
tuate us to the practice of all virtue, and thereby to 
qualify us for the enjoyment of a blessed immor- 
tality." 

Such are the grand though simple objects which 
Barrow, from the first, has in view ; and accordingly 
the vast majority of his sermons are devoted to the 
illumination of daily duty by the light of the Chris- 
tian religion and of the Scriptures. They are on such 
subjects as the ''Pleasantness of Beligion;" "The 
Profitableness of Godliness ;" " Upright Walking- 
Sure Walking;" "The Duty of Prayer and of 
Thanksgiving ; " " Not to Offend in Word ; " 
" Against Foolish Talking and Jesting ; " " Of Eash 
and Yain Swearing;" "Against Evil Speaking in 
general;" against "The Folly of Slander;" "Of 
Quietness, and Doing our own Business ; " " Of 
being Imitators of Christ ;" " Of Submission to 
the Divine Will," u Of Contentment ;" " Of Industry 
in General, and in our Particular Calling;" " Of 
Obedience ;" of " Providing things Honest in the 
Sight of all Men." But he always endeavours to 
lay the foundation of his argument in the great 
truths of the Gospel, and there are several Sermons 



48 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



specially devoted to these. Above all, there is 
a series of " Sermons on the Creed," * of which the 
character, as distinguished from the great work of 
his contemporary, Pearson, is that he dwells on 
the vital and operative, rather than on the formal 
and scientific, side of our faith. When vindicating, 
for instance, our Saviour's Messiahship, he dwells 
with especial force, and with devout detail, on the 
supreme moral excellence of His character and His 
life. In short, Barrow is at once the most convinced 
of theologians and the most earnest of moralists ; 
and he throws his whole energy into the task of 
reinforcing religion by morality and morality by 
religion. He does not, indeed, except in a few 
remarkable instances, such as I have quoted, deal 
with the philosophical aspect of the great truths of 
the Christian faith ; nor is he even much concerned 
with the deeper moral problems of human nature. 
The sense of sin, with the profound questionings it 
aroused in the minds of men like Augustine, Luther, 
or even Bunyan, is not in any similar degree the 
motive power of his theology. His nature seems, 
perhaps, too sound and vigorous to have been en- 
tangled in the inward struggle to which the com- 
bined weakness and strength of an Augustine gave 
rise. He regarded Christianity, in fact, rather as the 
necessary condition of a sound and healthy human 



* ' Works,' vols, v., vi., vii. 



BARROW* 



49 



nature than as the remedy of a diseased one. It 
seems to his mind part of the essential constitution 
of things, and he inculcated it as the primary law of 
existence. 

Such was the work of Barrow, and he did it suc- 
cessfully. He accomplished it, moreover, by no 
other means than by a manly appeal to the reason, 
the good sense, and the good feeling of the men of 
his day. He refused to address his appeal to any 
lower Court than that of a reasonable and en- 
lightened conscience. " God," he says, " neither doth 
nor can enjoin us faith without reason ; but therefore 
doth require it as matter of duty from us, because 
he hath furnished sufficient reason to persuade us/' 
Indeed, it is one of his most essential characteristics 
that he is almost unable to conceive of a man acting 
under any other motive than a firm intellectual 
persuasion. " If we do seriously weigh the case," he 
says,* " we shall find, that to require faith without 
reason is to demand an impossibility ; for faith is 
an effect of persuasion, and persuasion is nothing 
else but the application of some reason to the mind, 
apt to draw forth its assent. No man, therefore, 
can believe he knoweth not what or why ; he that 
truly believeth must apprehend the proposition, and 
he must discern its connection with some principle 
of truth, which as more notorious to him he before 



* ' Works,' vol. v. p. 51. 

[ST. JAMES'S.] 



E 



50 



CLASSIC PKEACHEES : 



doth admit ; otherwise he doth only pretend to 
believe, out of some design, or from affection to some 
party ; his faith is not so much really faith, as 
hypocrisy, craft, fondness, or faction." There is, it 
must be allowed, too much rigidity in this defini- 
tion ; it makes too little allowance for the appeal of 
faith to those instincts of the heart which lie deeper 
than the intellect, and at the same time are nearer 
the surface of human nature. JFor instance, it pre- 
vents Barrow apprehending, as has been already 
observed, the depth and importance of the great 
controversy of the early years of the Keforma- 
tion respecting faith. But if this be an error, it 
is at all events one which his countrymen would 
be very ready to excuse, and which was, perhaps, 
especially welcome after the deluge of irrational en- 
thusiasm with which the country had been flooded. 
It is at least an error on the manly side; and 
it requires, perhaps, an intrepidity like that of 
Barrow — the same kind of daring with which, on 
his voyage to Constantinople, he fought one of 
the guns of his ship against an Algerine pirate — 
to be thus prepared, as it were, to stake the whole 
success of our cause on the superiority of the 
intellectual batteries we can bring into action. 
But Englishmen love a good fighter; and as long 
as men admire manly appeals to reason, free from 
the slightest touch of affectation, so long will Barrow 
demand the attention, and extort the respect, of 



BARROW. 



51 



every one who is competent to enter into the 
Christian controversy. 

Accordingly, though there may have been, per- 
haps, in the English Church, profounder or more 
subtle theologians, more eloquent or more polished 
Preachers, there has been no one who has exhibited 
more forcibly the harmony of the Christian faith 
with the moral convictions, the scientific progress, 
and the solid learning of Englishmen. Barrow 
emerges from amidst the confusion of his time like a 
well-armed champion, trained in every moral and in- 
tellectual exercise, the representative alike of the old 
and the new learning, of classical culture, of experi- 
mental philosophy, and above all of Christian belief, 
and he challenges all the forces of anarchy to break 
the bonds which unite these influences. May we not 
all in these days learn something from his manliness 
and his faith ? He has had, indeed, his successors 
in every age, though none perhaps of quite so 
vigorous, so sound, and so intrepid a nature. But 
we, like him, are surrounded by the brilliant dawn of 
what is almost a new experimental philosophy ; we, 
like him, witness the very name of religion dis- 
graced all around us by what he called " furious zeal 
for and against trivial circumstances," and some- 
times by miserable perversions of its truths and 
ordinances. Like him, we see men recoiling from 
these scandals and acquiescing in infidelity or scep- 
ticism ; like him, too, we see the political forces of 

E 2 



52 



CLASSIC PEEACHEKS. 



Europe in a kind of combustion, and we live in daily 
dread of a conflagration. Can we do better than 
follow his example, by concentrating our energies on 
the essential truths of the Gospel and the plain and 
obvious duties of morality ? 



SOUTH 



(J 




THE EHETOEICIAN. 



Peculiar character of the age in which South lived, owing to 
the various schools of thought which were beginning to show 
themselves in the Church of England — This character due to 
the genius of the English Eeformation, which had encouraged 
greater freedom of thought, and greater love of antiquity, than 
existed in any other of the Eeformed Churches — Consequent 
certainty of a struggle between these opposing elements, which 
actually took place under Charles I. and Charles II. 

Sketch of the life of South — His education at Westminster and 
at Oxford — His early indications of great ability, and of strong 
antipathy to the Puritans — Is made Chaplain to Lord Clarendon, 
and Canon of Christ Church — Spends his life at Oxford as the 
favourite preacher of the University and the Cavaliers— His 
support of Lord Arran. 

General characteristics of South's ability as a preacher— Compared 
with Bossuet — Instances of his powers of arrangement and analysis 
— His defects in religious feeling — Comparison in this respect 
with Jeremy Taylor — Occasional passages of great beauty. 

View of South's character as a politician, which injured his charac- 
ter as a preacher — Evidenced by his absolute devotion to his 
party, and to the " Divine Eight of Kings," and his hatred of the 
Puritans — Excuses to be found in the narrowness of the Puritan 
party, but the persecuting spirit displayed against them is still 
indefensible. 

Summary of his excellencies and defects. 

The divine whose character and writings we are 
to consider to-day, if he can scarcely be called one of 
the greatest men of the Church of England, was yet 



54 



CLASSIC PKEACHEES : 



endowed with one remarkable gift which has never 
been common amongst her writers. He was, perhaps, 
the most powerful rhetorician, not excepting Jeremy 
Taylor, whom she has produced ; and if we cannot 
call him her greatest preacher ; if time, which has 
only added to the glory of Bossuet and Massillon, 
and which allows us still to study even Beveridge 
and Barrow, has seen South pass into comparative 
neglect, this is due to no want of natural power in 
himself, but to the fact that the value of his writings 
is impaired by so large an alloy of party spirit, and 
that he gave such full scope to his powers of sarcasm 
and invective, that it is very difficult to give an 
adequate idea of his Sermons without quoting 
passages which modern taste would reject. He 
lived, indeed, at a time which proverbially tries the 
tempers of men— at the close of a great revolution, 
when much judgment and moderation were re- 
quired to meet the wants of the Church of Eng- 
land, then at the end of the struggles which had 
marked the first century of her history, and violently 
agitated both by the remembrance of her suffer- 
ings under Cromwell, and by her sudden victory at 
the Kestoration of 1660. Her long conflict might 
at first sight appear to have been of eminent 
service to the Church, for it had given birth, both 
within and without her pale, to a line of eminent 
men, and a vigour and a variety of thought greater 
than she had hitherto known. Thus the generous 



SOUTH. 



55 



love of learning — which was perhaps the brightest 
feature in the character of Archbishop Laud, and 
which led him to encourage men of ability in schools 
very different from his own — had already produced 
Chillingworth, Hales, and Jeremy Taylor ; Sander- 
son was still alive, and Hammond only recently 
dead ; Pearson was at the height of his reputation ; 
South and Bull, and Beveridge and Barrow were 
already conspicuous ; while, not to speak of Baxter and 
Howe, who had not yet left her pale, a new school of 
eminent men had arisen, of whom Tillotson, Stilling- 
fleet, and Burnet were the chief active representa- 
tives ; and who, closely allied with an original class 
of thinkers at Cambridge, were forming (what had 
hitherto been scarcely known) a Moderate party 
in the Church. But this list is itself enough to 
show us not merely the greatness of the Church of 
England in those days, but also its difficulties ; 
for it is evident that all the modern elements of 
thought and contest which exist in our present 
Church were alive, if they were not yet active, 
soon after the Restoration, and it would have re- 
quired no small power in the leading prelates to 
restrain this extraordinary outburst of theological 
thought within the limits of a single Church. 
Without imagining that elements so diverse could 
have been brought into perfect harmony, we are 
apt at such periods to long for the presence of a 
master-mind, and it cannot be said that Sheldon, 



56 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



Ward, and Sancroft, or even Cosin, were adequate 
to the emergency. The general tone and temper 
adopted by South, who was incomparably their 
greatest preacher, will throw some light on the diffi- 
culties and the failures of the Church. 

The difficulties, indeed, to which I have alluded, 
and which must never be forgotten in judging the 
conduct of the Church of England at this critical 
period of her existence, were simply due to that 
cause which has always been both its strength and 
weakness — the attempt to be, in a true sense, large 
and national. The very circumstances of its origin 
have forced it to include within its pale schools 
of religious thought which no other Church has 
attempted to unite. Half Catholic and hal f Protes- 
tant under Henry VIII. and Cranmer — Lutheranised 
under Edward VI., and involved in a bloody struggle 
by Mary — it was not able to adopt the narrow and 
one-sided system of Luther or Calvin ; and it soon 
discovered, when it began to take a more definite 
form under Elizabeth, that the spirit of the old 
religion was still powerful, and that much of the 
best religious thought of England retained a strong 
Catholic impress. The reign of Mary, indeed, had 
embittered the popular feeling against the Koman 
Catholics, and they were almost crushed as a party by 
the ruthless cruelty of Elizabeth ; but the Calvinistic 
party never took their place, and the great 1 Ecclesi- 
astical Polity' of Hooker, the earliest and most 



SOUTH. 



57 



lasting work of English theology, confirmed the 
principal teachers of the English Church in that 
warm attachment to the Church of the earliest ages 
of Christianity which was but little known to the 
other Churches of the Eeformation. But the inde- 
pendent spirit of Calvinism, though thus rejected by 
the greatest of the English clergy, early obtained 
an influence which was, perhaps, rather political than 
religious, over many of the ablest men of the English 
gentry and middle classes ; and it was owing to 
the alliance of the Church party, and especially of 
Archbishop Laud, with the despotism of James and 
Charles, that Eliot, Hampden, Pym, Cromwell, in 
a word, of some of the greatest politicians whom 
England has ever produced, were mostly Noncon- 
formists. Thus the great Civil War was a struggle 
between religious as well as political principles ; but 
though for a while Calvinism was triumphant, its 
very victory was its destruction. The ten years of 
the reign of the Puritans are perhaps the most 
convincing evidence that Calvinism, from its narrow- 
ness, bitterness, and want of reason, can never either 
attract the mass, or satisfy the most thoughtful, of 
our countrymen. When it fell, the old Church of 
England at once resumed its place ; but it was no 
longer the same as it had been in the days of Andre wes 
and Laud, for it had all the fresh elements of 
religious thought and activity, of which I have just 
spoken, to mould or to struggle with. 



58 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



It is facts such as these which make the fifty years 
from the Kestoration in 1660 to the beginning of the 
eighteenth century so marked a period in the history 
of the Church of England, because it saw that Church 
assume its final form and enter upon what may be 
called its modern course. The High Church party, 
(though the name was not yet known)* the Moderate 
party, the Latitudinarian party, the Nonconformist 
party, were now branching in different directions 
from the two old parties of the Church of the 
Puritans ; and it is certainly no small proof of the 
large and Catholic character of the Church, that 
Bull and South, and Pearson and Jeremy Taylor, 
and Cud worth and Locke, and Boyle and Isaac 
Newton, were not only able to live as its attached 
members, but may be numbered amongst its greatest 
writers. This is a fact which must not be forgotten 
when we lament the failure of the larger attempts 
at comprehension which were made in the reigns of 
Charles II. and William. Meanwhile, it is needless 
to add that this period was also one of vehement 
struggle, in which Churchmen, Nonconformists, and 
Eoman Catholics had their alternate triumphs, and 
which was likely, therefore, to breed a race of 
vigorous combatants. No writer, in his Sermons 



* South in one of his Sermons 
[ attacks his opponents for invent- 
'» mg the name of " High Church ;" 
and Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester, 



ridicules the name of " Lati- 
tudinarian," which had been 
assigned to the divines of Tillot- 
son's school. 



SOUTH. 



59 



especially, throws more light on the fierce contests of 
the time than the brilliant preacher whom we now 
proceed to describe. 

Eobert South, the son of an eminent London 
merchant, was born in the year 1633 ; " a period," 
says one of his biographers, " when the artifices of 
designing sectaries against the established govern- 
ment in Church and State made it necessary that 
so bright an assertor of both should arise ;" and he 
was early sent as a boy to Westminster School. 
Westminster was then the scene of excitements 
and riots, which remind us more of the earlier 
outbursts of the French Ee volution than of the 
comparatively moderate course of our own civil war, 
and Souths boyish ears must have often heard 
the shouts of the mob as they clamoured "Down 
with the Bishops;" or denounced the Lords who 
were supposed to be favourable to Strafford as 
" Straffordians, enemies to their country."* The 
instincts of the scholars of the "Boyal School of 
Westminster " were not very likely to be on the side 
of the Puritans ; and we shall easily believe one of 
South's Sermons, preached long afterwards to the 
School, in which he tells them that in the " very 
worst of times, when it was his lot to be a member of 
a school untaintedly loyal, we were really King's 
scholars, as well as called so ;" and he adds that on 
that very day, " that eternally black and infamous 

* Clarendon, vol. i. p. 449. 



60 



CLASSIC PKEACHERS: 



day, of the King's murder, I myself heard the King 
publicly prayed for " (this was said to have been done 
by South himself) " but an hour or two at most before 
his sacred head was struck off."* His great master, 
Busby, had early detected the remarkable talents 
of " that sulky boy," South ; and he passed in the 
same election with Locke to Christ Church, where he 
was known, perhaps too early, as the great scholar 
and wit of his day ; and he soon took an opportunity 
in some public exercise in Christ Church Hall for 
indulging, as a Puritan writer expresses it, "in a 
violent invective against all the most serious pro- 
fessors of godliness." For this, and some similar 
performances, he was rebuked by Owen, whom 
Cromwell had placed at the head of Christ Church, as 
one who ' ' sat in the seat of the scornful ;" a rebuke 
which he. soon repaid in his earliest Sermon, on 'The 
Professors of Godliness, but Workers of Iniquity, 
with their sad countenances and hypocritical groan- 
ings/ which was preached in 1659, during the 
confusion of the Convention.! The Eestoration of 



* South adds : " And this 
loyal genius always continued 
amongst us, and grew up with 
us ; which made that noted 
Corypheus of the Independent 
faction, Dr. John Owen (some 
time after promoted by Crom- 
well to the Deanery of Christ 
Church in Oxford), often say 
that it would never be well with 



the nation till this school was 
suppressed ; for that it naturally 
bred up men to an opposition to 
the Government. And so far, 
indeed, he was right." 

t South quotes in the notes to 
this Sermon a fact which Bishop 
Burnet has described more gra- 
phically. " Goodwin, who had 
pretended to assure them in a 



SOUTH. 



61 



Charles II., which almost immediately followed, 
gave fuller scope to Souths abilities, and though 
still a very young man (he was scarcely twenty- 
seven) he was already the great preacher of the 
University. 

He at once seized the occasion of a Commission, 
sent down immediately on Charles's return to re- 
store Oxford to its pre-Cromwellian state, to preach 
a powerful Sermon in favour of a learned clergy* — 
" The Scribe instructed to the Kingdom of Heaven" 
— in which he mixes several fine descriptions of the 
character of Scripture oratory with his usual invec- 
tives against his opponents. I will venture to quote, 
thus early, a single passage which will give us an 
idea of both. " Where," he says, speaking of the \ 
eloquence of Scripture, " where do we ever find sor- 
row flowing in such a naturally prevailing pathos 
as in the lamentations of Jeremiah ? One would 
think that every letter was wrote with a tear, every 
word was the noise of a breaking heart ; that the 
author was a man compacted of sorrows ; disciplined to 



prayer that Cromwell should not the Father's glory, and the ex- 



die, which was but a few minutes 



press image of His person." If 



before he expired, had now the such was the general Puritan 

impudence to say to God, ' Thou j tone, it goes far to excuse South's 

hast deceived us, and we were sarcasms. (Burnet's ' Own 

deceived.' " Sterry, praying for Times,' i. 114. 
Richard, used these indecent * It was preached July 29, 

words, next to blasphemy : 1660. 
"Make him the brightness of 



62 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



grief from liis infancy ; one who never breathed but 
in sighs, nor spoke but in tears and groans. So that 
he who said he would not read the Scripture for fear 
of spoiling his style, showed himself as much a 
blockhead as an atheist, and to have as small a gust 
of the elegancies of expression as of the sacred ness 
of the matter. . . ." And he adds that, " Ques- 
tionless when Christ says that a Scribe must be 
stocked with things new and old, we must not think 
that he meant that he should have a hoard of old 
sermons (whosoever made them), with a bundle of 
new opinions ; for this certainly would have furnished 
out such entertainment to his spiritual guests, as no 
rightly-disposed palate could ever relish."* 

It is probable that the applause from the Cavaliers, 
which greeted these earliest outbursts of their long 
pent-up indignation; was of real injury to South's 
abilities and character, by making him their favourite 
paitv preacher. He was quickly rewarded by being 
chosen Public Orator in 1660, when he was only in 
his twenty-eighth year ; congratulated Clarendon on 
his inauguration as Chancellor in a brilliant speech ; 
was made one of his Chaplains, and appointed to 
preach before the King at Whitehall. It was during 
this Sermon that the Puritans declared that whilst 
denouncing the great Rebellion he was seized with 
such qualms of conscience that he was obliged to 



* iii. 22, 24. 



SOUTH. 



63 



leave the pulpit ; but the feeling must have been 
a very transitory one, for we may safely say that 
almost every public discourse is deformed by de- 
scriptions either of Oliver Cromwell as " the Great 
Master of ILisrule," or of " the blind adder " Milton, 
or by vehement onslaughts on the Puritans and 
Nonconformists. He was soon afterwards appointed 
a Prebendary of Westminster, as well as Canon of 
Christ Church, and the rest of his long life was 
passed between Westminster and Oxford. He never 
obtained, nor does it appear that he sought for, any 
higher or more active preferment in the Church. 
In Oxford a succession of great Deans — Fell, Aldrich, 
and Atterbury, to say nothing of Canons like 
Pococke, and students like Locke — had made Christ 
Church the centre of the talent of the University, 
which, according to the impartial testimony of Bur- 
net,, was now distinguishing itself as a place of real 
learning, particularly in the Eastern languages and 
in the Fathers, though the number of students was 
small, and too much in accordance with the character 
of the Court, which often resorted there. South was 
the great University preacher, and his subsequent 
career might be easily tracked by his Sermons.* He, 

* His only prolonged absence to congratulate the great John 
from his work seems to have I Sobieski on his accession. He 
been in 1674, when he accom- has left a very curious sketch of 
panied Lawrence Hyde, after- i Poland, addressed to his warmest 
wards Lord Rochester, who was j Oxford friend, Pococke. 
sent as Ambassador to Poland I 



64 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



no doubt, supported Dr. Jane, the active but pliant 
Professor of Divinity, in the famous decree of Passive 
Obedience which passed Convocation on the day 
of the execution of Lord Kussell, against " certain 
damnable doctrines, destructive of the sacred per- 
sons of Princes," and we may be sure that all the 
bitterest Acts of Parliament against the Dissenters — 
the two Acts of Uniformity, the Conventicle Act, the 
Five Mile Act, which drove 2000 clergy out of the 
Church of England and imprisoned Baxter and 
Bunyan — received his hearty approbation. He even 
carried his hatred of novelties so far, that, in the true 
old style of Oxford, he denounced the newly-formed 
Koyal Society, of which the eminent Bishop Ward of 
Salisbury was the second President, in a speech, as 
Public Orator. It would be very curious if we could 
ascertain what were his relations with his old school- 
fellow Locke, at Christ Church, in whose expulsion 
he must have borne a part. He declared himself 
ready to put on a buff coat against Monmouth ; 
and would take no part whatever against James II., 
though he did not become a Nonjuror. But he, of 
course, opposed every act of toleration or comprehen- 
sion during the reign of William, and was a warm 
supporter of Sacheverell in 1670 ; and one of his last 
acts was an hearty adhesion to Lord Arran (whose 
brother, the Duke of Ormond, had been just before 
impeached for high treason), who was elected by the 
Chapter to the High Stewardship of Westminster, 



SOUTH. 



65 



— an office still in their gift — with the words, " Heart 
and hand for my Lord Arran." He died at the age 
of eighty-three, in 1716. 

South has made the following assertion in one 
of his Sermons. "I look," he says, "upon the 
old Church of England Royalist (which I take to 
be only another name for a man who prefers 
his conscience before his interest) to be the best 
Christian, and the most meritorious subject in the 
world ;" and certainly our first impression of his 
character and powers from the above outline would 
be that he was, above all, the preacher of the trium- 
phant Cavaliers, the cardinal article of whose faith 
was the Divine right of Kings, and who, in the full 
sense of the term, had " given up to party " talents 
which were " meant for mankind." But this, though 
in some respects true, would give a very inadequate 
idea of the power of sermons which may be profitably 
studied even now, for South was of the true blood 
of the great orators — of Demosthenes and Burke, 
as much as of Bossuet and Massillon. Xo doubt he , 
allowed both his passion and his wit to overrun,' 
and thus often to spoil, his style and his thoughts ; 
but if we can put this great defect out of sight, 
he has almost every gift which marks the orator — 
powers equally great of thought and expression ; a 
nervous and manly style, full, but never overcharged 
with learning, and an admirable arrangement. 
Burnet, whose remarks on the preaching of the day 

[sr. james's.] F 



66 



CLASSIC PREACHEES! 



in his ' Pastoral Care' are most valuable, speaks 
slightingly of the English preachers before the 
Kestoration, but adds that since that time they had 
greatly improved by studying the French ; and it 
was probably his dislike to South, whom he calls a 
" learned, but ill-natured divine," which prevents him 
from mentioning him when he is describing Tillotson 
(strangely enough to our modern taste) as the best 
preacher of his time. John Wesley, no bad judge 
of the requisites for a preacher, places " the manly 
sense of Dr. South " far above the talents, which 
he much under-estimates, of the French preachers. 
The preacher, indeed, with whom South might be 
most naturally compared is Bossuet ; and though he 
is very inferior to that greatest master of sacred 
oratory in dignity of style, and in that high tone of 
religious earnestness which is Bossuet's crowning ex- 
cellence, he perhaps surpasses him in the terse vigour 
of his language, and his lively, if not always decorous, 
illustrations. Let me try to establish some of these 
statements by a closer examination of South's power 
as a preacher. 

First, South was a master both of arrangement and 
analysis, without which neither written nor spoken 
oratory are often efficient; and we may often trace in 
his clear divisions the effects of a close study of the 
Khetoric and Ethics of Aristotle. One of his greatest 
Sermons, on " The Creation of Man in the Image of 
God," is a good example of this. Perhaps, indeed, we 



SOUTH. 



67 



might hesitate in this critical age to invest the first 
man with all the powers of philosophy, and to say 
that " An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, 
and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise." But this 
doubtful view does not affect either the clear analysis 
or the animated description which South gives of 
the powers of the human mind in its ideal state 
of perfection. The main thought is very simple. 
The image of God consists in the perfection of 
the whole man divided under the three heads of the 
Understanding, the Will, and the Passions, and he 
vividly describes them all. It is difficult to give 
any idea of his power without a few extracts. 
" First," he says, " take man's noblest faculty, 
the Understanding. It was then sublime, clear, 
aspiring, and, as it were, the soul's upper region, lofty 
and serene, free from the vapours and disturbances 
of the lower affections. It was the leading, control- 
ling faculty. All the passions wore the colours of 
reason. It did not so much persuade as command. 
It was not Consul but Dictator. Discourse was then 
almost as quick as intuition. It was nimble in 
proposing, firm in concluding. It could sooner 
determine than now it can dispute. Like the 
sun, it had both light and agility ; it knew no rest 
but in motion, no quiet but in activity. ... It 
arbitrated upon all the reports of Sense, and all the 
varieties of Imagination, not, like a drowsy judge, 
only hearing, but also directing their verdict." 

f 2 



68 CLASSIC PKEACHEES: 

Or let us take again the following example of 
his power of analysing the passions. "The grand 
leading affection of all," he tells us, "is Love. 
This is the great instrument and engine of nature, 
the bond and cement of society, the spring and 
spirit of the universe. Love is such an affection as 
cannot so properly be said to be in the soul, as the 
soul to be in that. It is the whole man wrapt up into 
one desire ; all the powers, vigour, and faculty of 
the soul abridged into one inclination ; and it is of 
that active, restless nature, that it must of necessity 
exert itself, so that it will fasten upon any inferior, 
unsuitable object, rather than upon none at all. 
The soul may sooner leave off to subsist than to 
love ; and, like the vine, it withers and dies if it 
has nothing to embrace. Now this affection, in 
its state of innocence, was happily pitched upon 
its right object ; it flamed up in direct fervour of 
emotion to G-od and of charity to its neighbour. . . . 
It was a vestal, and a virgin fire ; and differed as 
much from that which usually passes by its name 
nowadays, as the vital heat from the burning of a 
fever." 

I have ventured to quote these passages at full 
length, because in the case of a great preacher it 
is absolutely necessary to allow him occasionally to 
speak for himself; and even these extracts may 
be enough to show that scarcely any gift of the 
orator was wanting to South, except, indeed, that 



SOUTH. 



69 



which, gives the finish, to all oratory, the genuine 
enthusiasm which inspires the strongest appeals of 
passionate feeling. This, the great power of the 
highest preachers, is almost a necessity for the 
religious orator, and it was the want of this in 
Toouth which left him the great ^rhetorician, and 
made him fall short of the true orator. In this 
respect he is certainly far inferior to Jeremy Taylor, 
though I venture to think that Mr. Coleridge was 
forgetting for a moment the essential distinction 
between writing and speaking, when he calls Taylor 
"the most eloquent of divines;" and adds, -'had I 
said of men, Cicero would forgive me, and Demo- 
sthenes nod assent."* We do not believe that 
writings so diffuse and luxuriant as those of Taylor 
ever achieved the great object of the orator, persua- 
sion ; and this feeling is well expressed in a powerful 
passage of South, who, if we may judge from some of 
the expressions, seems to have been distinctly alluding 
to his great contemporary. " ' I speak the words 
of soberness,' says St. Paul, 6 and I preach the Gospel, 
not with enticing words of man's wisdom.' This was 
the way of the Apostles, discoursing of things sacred. 
Nothing here of the fringes of the North Star ; 
nothing of 'nature's becoming unnatural;' nothing 
of 'the dowm of angel's wings, or the beautiful locks 
of cherubims ; ' no starched similitudes, introduced 



* 1 Aids to Keflection,' p. 219. 



70 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



with a ' thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy 
mansion.' No ; these were sublimities above the 
rise of the Apostolic spirit, for the Apostles, poor 
mortals ! were content to take lower steps . . . and 
to use a dialect which only pierced the conscience, 
and made the hearers cry out, ' Men and brethren, 
what shall we do ?' It tickled not the ear, but 
sunk into the heart ; and when men came from such 
sermons, they never commended the preacher for his 
taking voice or gesture ; for the fineness of such a 
simile, or the quaintness of such a sentence ; but 
they spoke like men conquered by the overpowering 
force and evidence of the most concerning truths, 
much in the words of the two disciples going to 
Emmaus, ' Did not our hearts burn within us while 
He opened to us the Scriptures ?' "* Passages like 
this show us at once the strength and the weakness 
of South, and deepen our regret that so great a 
master of " manly sense" should not also have been 
the greatest religious teacher amongst our preachers. 
We have already intimated the causes which made 
South fall short of this great position, and which 
would lead us rather to turn for the expression of 
true devotional feeling to Jeremy Taylor or Barrow, 
or Beveridge or Baxter. It is, however, only just to 
South to say that in Sermons which naturally called 
for high feeling, he could speak like a man " con- 



* iv. 152. 



SOUTH. 



71 



quered," to use his own words, " by the force of over- 
powering truth," as in the following description 
of our Saviour's sufferings. " This," he says, " was 
our Saviour's condition. There was a sword which 
reached his very spirit, and pierced his soul, till it 
bled through his body ; for they were the struggles 
and agonies of the inward man, the labours and 
stirrings of his restless thoughts, which cast his body 
into that prodigious sweat. It was the spirit that 
took the pains. It was that which was then treading 
the winepress of God's wrath alone, till it made him 
red in his apparel, and dyed all his garments with 
blood. What thought can reach, or tongue express, 
what our Saviour then felt within His own breast! 
The image of all the sins of the world, for which He 
was to suffer, then appeared clear and lively, and 
express to His mind. He saw how much the honour 
of the great God was abused by them, and how many 
millions of poor souls they must have inevitably cast 
under the pressure of a wrath infinite and intolerable, 
should he not have turned the blow upon himself- 
The horror of which then filled and amazed his 
vast apprehensive soul, and those apprehensions 
could not but affect his tender heart, then brimful 
of the highest zeal for God's glory, and /he most 
relenting compassion for the souls of m/en, till it 
fermented and boiled over with transport ,and agony, 
and even forced its way through all' his body, 
in those strange ebullitions of blood,' not to be 



72 



CLASSIC PEEACHEKS: 



paralleled by the sufferings of any person recorded 
in any history whatsoever." * 

It will be obvious both from the above extracts, 
and from the general description which has already 
been given of South, that he comes before us in a 
double character, and that his preaching was too 
largely the reflection of his politics. His political 
violence was in fact equally injurious to his charac- 
ter, his judgment, and his eloquence. Thus we might 
at first have expected that a man endowed with a 
power of sarcasm equal to Juvenal would, at least, 
have made his lash thoroughly felt by the vices of 
the most immoral period of English history, and 
that he would not have spared the Court, which 
was the centre of them all. He was, indeed, to 
all appearance a high-principled, and certainly he 
was an outspoken man, and there are no doubt 
several occasions where he vigorously denounces the 
vices of the day, as when he says that " all possible 
courtship is now thought too little to be used 
towards persons infamous and odious, and fit to be 
visited by none but God Himself, who visits after a 
very different manner from the courtiers of the world." 
But, speaking generally, it must be allowed that 
South's hatred of vice is a far less prominent feature 
in his preaching than his hatred of Nonconformity ; 

i 

\ * iii. 85. 

\ 



SOUTH. 



73 



for his predominant passions were an absolute 
devotion to the Court, or at least to the King, and 
an intense horror of what he called the "Holder- 
forths " among the Puritans ; and it is curious, and 
at the same time painful, to observe the extent to 
which those feelings absorbed and warped the moral 
sense of an otherwise upright and manly judgment. 
I am not, indeed, sure that, under any circumstances, 
South would have been prepared to play the part of 
John the Baptist, or to imitate the example of Ken,^ ^ 
in rebuking the vices of Charles II. But although 
his intense veneration not only for the office but for 
the person of the King undoubtedly made him a 
less severe censor of the morals of the time than he 
would otherwise have been, it would be unjust to 
attribute his conduct to adulation. The devotion of 
the English clergy and gentry even to the worst 
of the Stuart Princes is due to a far better cause. 
The death of King Charles I., as the contemporary 
evidence of Bishop Burnet assures us, "and his 
serious and unsuspicious deportment in it, had made 
all his former errors entirely forgot, and drew a 
lasting hatred on the actors ; " * and this may, in a 
measure, account for the extravagant form in which 
the " Divine Eight of Kings," a doctrine almost 
unknown to English history till the days of the 
Stuarts, was held by so many eminent divines, till it 



* Burnet's ' Own Times,' i. 69. 



74 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



was rudely destroyed by the Kevolution of 1688. 
South was not very likely to be guarded in his 
language in speaking of what he calls " the blackest 
act which the sun ever saw since he hid his face at 
the Crucifixion," and of which he says that " to drop 
the blackest ink and the bitterest gall upon such 
an act is not satire, but propriety." Accordingly, 
in one of his Sermons preached before the King, 
which is perhaps the most extraordinary combina- 
tion of eulogy and invective ever published, we find 
him asserting not only that " Kings are endowed 
by God with sagacity and quickness of understanding 
above other men," and that God disposes their hearts 
to such virtuous and pious courses, as He has pro- 
mised a blessing to ;"* but he is so transported in his 
eulogies of Charles I., as to sum them up by declar- 
ing that " he was a father to his country, if but for 
this only that he was the father to such a son." 

It is needless to add, and it would be painful fully 
to exhibit, the extent of South's animosity to the 
Puritan party. We are not their apologists. In 
many respects they may be regarded, their own 
writers being the judges, as almost the most narrow, 
bitter, and disagreeable sect which sprang from the 
Eeformation. Neither can we regard the failure of 
the Savoy Conference, the last attempt to retain the 
bulk of the Puritans within the Church of England, 



* ii. 566. 



SOUTH. 



75 



as so unmixed an evil as liberal historians have 
described it ; for it may well be doubted whether the 
attempt to combine minds so different as those of 
Baxter and Cosin, the stiff Presbyterian and the 
strict Anglo-Catholic, could have been permanently 
successful. The Puritan party was, indeed, still 
very much the same that it was in its conflict with 
Hooker. There was the same stickling for small 
objects, the rejection of the Cross at Baptism and of 
the Surplice, the same antipathy to introducing any 
beauty or art into the worship of God, and the same 
objection to those great principles of Church govern- 
ment which Hooker had so eloquently asserted. 
The tendency would have been, as the other leaders 
of the Church party, like Cosin and Sanderson, 
probably saw, to form a schism within the Church 
instead of without ; or, as South expressed it, " By 
yielding or giving place to them, a pernicious and 
incurable schism would have been brought into 
the Church."* Unquestionably there were to be 
found among the Puritans men of eminent good- 
ness and toleration like Baxter. Nor need we 
hesitate to admire the courageous zeal even of the 
fiery zealots of Cromwell's army, or the evident 
piety of most of their greatest writers. Yet even 
Baxter, judging by his own account and that of his 
friends, was one of the most impracticable of men ; 



* iv. 198. 



76 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



and as he described the Book of Coinmon Prayer as 
" a dose of opium, likely to cure diseases by extin- 
guishing life," he may be believed when he himself 
says, <£ that the world will see that we differ in greater 
things than ceremonies and forms of prayer."* We 
cannot, therefore, but regard the attempt to widen 
the Church of England in a Presbyterian direction, 
which was made at the Savoy Conference in 1.662, 
as a matter of doubtful policy, which the Church 
party may have well been wise in resisting. But 
the persecution of the Puritans which followed was 
a very different matter. The Act of Uniformity, 
the Conventicle Act, and the Five Mile Act, are 
quite as odious in principle as the Bevocation of the 
Edict of Nantes ; they were forced upon a reluctant 
King, who had pledged his word to the Presbyterians 
that he would secure for them freedom of worship ; 
and the last and most cruel was passed at the very 
time when the Nonconformists had rendered eminent 
service during the Plague in London by preaching 
in the " empty pulpits," deserted, in too many 
instances, by their own clergy. "f The tone adopted 
by South was a direct instigation to measures of this 
kind, and was probably prompted by their authors, 
Archbishop Sheldon and Bishop Ward. It would 



* Baxter's 'Life,' 213, 320, 325. 

t Burnet, i. 314. He adds, 
indeed : " They began to preach 
openly, not without reflecting on 



the sins of the Court, and on the 
ill-usage that they themselves 
had met with. This was repre- 
sented very odiously at Oxford." 



S0T7TH. 



f y 

77 



be easy to quote many passages full of his caustic 
wit on this • ubject ; but I shall only give one short 
extract from a Sermon preached in 1871, when the 
contest with the Nonconformists was still raging. 
Their tenderness " of conscience," says South, u is 
such an one as makes men scruple at the lawfulness 
of a set form of worship, at the use of some solemn 
rites and ceremonies in the worship of God, but 
makes them not stick at all at sacrilege, nor at 
rebellion, nor at the murder of their King, nor at 
the robbery and undoing of their fellow-subjects ; 
villainies which not only Christianity proscribes, but 
the common reason of mankind rises up against, and 
by the very light of nature condemns. And did not 
those among us who plead tenderness of conscience 
do all these things ? Nay, did they not do them in 
the very strength of this plea ?"* 

It is painful to quote invectives which nothing 
can justify, yet it may be said, as a final excuse for 
South, that this feeling was, for a time at least, that 
of the whole nation, of the laity quite as much as 
the clergy. Clarendon and Southampton, Charles's 
best ministers, shared it. The Puritan party was, 
in fact, now suffering the penalty of ten years of 
tyranny, when, in the words of a historian nowise 
unfavourable to them, "they had forbidden, under 
heavy penalties, the use of the Book of Common 



* ii. 376. 



78 



CLASSIC TKEACHEES : 



Prayer; not only in churches but even in private 
houses ; when it had been a crime in a child to 
read by the bedside of a sick parent one of those 
beautiful Collects which had soothed the griefs of 
forty generations of Christians ; when clergymen of 
respectable character were not only ejected from 
their benefices by thousands, but were frequently 
exposed to the outrages of a fanatical rabble :"* when 
so much that was beautiful in Churches and Cathe- 
drals had been ruthlessly defaced, and almost every- 
thing which reminded men that Christ's religion 
had been dear to their forefathers for sixteen cen- 
turies was deemed on that very account unholy. If 
we are inclined to judge South, and even prelates 
like Cosin, with severity, we must remember that 
their language often only expresses the indignation 
which even religious men will feel against a tyrannous 
attempt to injure Christianity by limiting it to the 
teaching of a narrow and intolerant sect. 

In the above remarks on the writings of this 
eminent man, I may possibly appear to have dwelt 
too much on the defective side of his character. But 
the palm of sacred oratory is not to be won even 
by the highest intellectual gifts alone ; and while I 
have gladly recognised the natural genius of South 
as an Orator, I have felt that it is equally important 
to exhibit the causes of his failure to attain the 



* Macaulay's ' History of England,' i. 161. 



SOUTH. 



79 



highest rank as a Preacher. I have endeavoured, in 
a word, to describe South's sermons justly; both 
as they show the power of the man and the charac- 
ter of his times — which influenced him, in some 
respects, so unfortunately. He was, perhaps, born y 
with too keen and caustic a wit, and he indulged 
it too unsparingly, ever to have been either a 
great man or a great preacher ; for wit like his 
tends to make men contemptuous of their fellows, 
and is seldom consistent with that generous en- 
thusiasm which is essential to true eloquence. But 
his natural powers, both of thought and expression, 
though they were often unwisely exercised, were 
as great as could be found in any preacher, either 
ancient or modern. And if we acknowledge with 
regret that in the gentler, sweeter, and. tenderer 
feelings, which are the crowning glory of the Christian 
preacher, South was deficient, we may still believe 
that writings marked by such powers of thought 
and expression, so rich in learning, in wit, and in 
illustration, and with so much of moral and religious 
wisdom, can never fail to be an instructive and often 
an elevating study. 



BEVERIDGE, &*a»Jc 

THE SCRIPTURAL PREACHER. 



Thy testimonies are my delight, and my counsellors." 

Psalm cxix. 24. 



The importance and significance of preaching — General character- 
istics of Beveridge as a theologian and preacher — Scriptural and 
Catholic — Opposed to Eomanism and Puritanism — His history 
— Great Rebellion — Life at Cambridge — Restoration — First 
writings — Vicar of Ealing— Rector of S. Peter's, Cornhill — 
Great work of his life — His practical piety — His strong Church - 
manship — The Revolution— Refuses Bath and Wells — Bishop 
of S. Asaph — His will— His position as a preacher. 

" We live in an age, and among a people that place 
a great part, if not the whole of their religion in 
hearing sermons." These are the words with which 
Bishop Beveridge commences a discourse on the 
" Ministers of the Gospel, Christ's Ambassadors ; " * 
and he goes on to complain that " we find but lew 
that are ever the more religious for all they hear ; " 
a complaint which is very familiar to us in every age 
of the Church. 

It is quite possible to exaggerate the importance 
of sermons, and it may be conceded that the mere 



* Serm. XI., ' Works ' (Angl. Cath. Libr.), vol. i. p. 195. 

[ST. JAMES'S.] G 



82 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



amount of preaching or of hearing will form a very 
uncertain measure of the depth and extent of religious 
life among a people. Yet no one can deny that a 
revival of religion has always been accompanied by 
an increased interest in the ordinance of preaching ; 
and- it would be difficult to suggest abetter means of 
ascertaining the prevailing religious sentiments of 
an age, than a complete and careful study of the 
sermons, which, as a matter of fact, were listened to 
by the Christian congregations of that age. The 
preacher is made by his age, and he in his turn 
helps to make it. In proportion to his influence, 
he is both representative of the spirit and modes of 
thought of the generation to which he belongs, and 
a power by which that spirit and those thoughts 
are moulded. 

It is, however, a much easier task to ascertain the 
doctrinal position, or even the historical influence of 
the preachers of past times, than to estimate their 
oratorical powers, or the secret of their influence in 
the pulpit. Oratory is not a mere matter of words, 
of phrases, of arguments, of method; it is, in its 
highest forms, the outgoing of the life — intellectual, 
moral, spiritual — of the preacher, upon the life and 
soul of his hearers. It is conveyed as much by tone, 
manner, gesture, as by language ; and even when we 
read the words which have moved multitudes to the 
very depth of their being, a few hours after they 
have been delivered, we are often unable to under- 



BEVEEIDGE. 



83 



stand the secret of their power; how much more 
when the circumstances in which they were spoken 
are forgotten, or removed into a distant past, and we 
are no longer under the influence of the ideas and 
habits to which they appealed ! 

There is, perhaps, a peculiar difficulty in studying 
a preacher like Beveridge, who was but little con- 
nected with the more stirring events of his times ; 
and who presents few of those striking peculiarities 
by which some preachers, in no other respect superior 
to himself, have been distinguished. Yet this ob- 
vious difficulty is undoubtedly counterbalanced by 
the advantage that he deals, for the most part, 
with subjects which are of abiding and eternal 
interest. In this respect, as in so many others, his 
sermons are like the Book which he delighted to 
study, speaking to us of human sinfulness and weak- 
ness, of Divine mercy and grace, of the life of God 
in the soul of man, of the means of grace and the 
hope of glory. Like the Psalms of David, they are 
full of words which, if they are hoary with age, are 
also fresh with the bloom of everlasting youth, which 
awaken an echo as true in the hearts of the servants 
of God in our own times, as in the days long gone by 
in which they were first uttered. 

We shall, perhaps, best understand the work of 
Bishop Beveridge, if we first consider his general 
characteristics as a preacher and a divine, and then 
note briefly how the man and the preacher was 

G 2 



84 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



made, and finally endeavour to set forth some of the 
most prominent features of his method and manner 
as a teacher. 

We have called Beveridge the " Scriptural 
Preacher." The very designation is an evidence of 
the difficulty of affixing any special characteristic to 
his genius. Yet it would not be easy to find another 
word which would be so truly and exactly descriptive, 
and it would be equally difficult, I fancy, to find 
another preacher to whom the title could be so 
justly applied. 

It is not merely that there are few preachers of 
any age who make such copious use of Holy Scrip- 
ture in their sermons, although this is true. It 
would not be just to say that he strings together 
texts from Scripture to supply the place of thought 
and matter of his own. It would be still less true 
to say that he drags in the words of the sacred 
writers without relevancy to the subject which he 
has in hand, or the point which he is seeking to 
establish. There are pulpit orators who are scrip- 
tural preachers in this bad sense of the words. It 
is not so with Beveridge. You hardly ever find a text 
misapplied, or which is not to the point. You hardly 
ever find a meaning forced out of the sacred Word to 
suit the purpose for which he employs it. Beveridge 
was a scriptural preacher because his own spirit was 
bathed in the spirit of the Word of God. He loved 
the Bible : God's testimonies were indeed his delight 



BEVEKIDGE. 



85 



and his counsellors. He spoke in scriptural language, 
because he thought in it, felt in it, lived in it, worked 
in it, prayed in it. 

Nor was he one of those — and they abound in all 
ages — who make the claim to be a true interpreter of 
Holy Scripture a means of promulgating their own 
private opinions, and often their own departures 
from Catholic truth. He would put no man or 
church between him and the Bible ; he would hold 
direct converse with the Spirit of God through His 
appointed oracles; but he also watched jealously 
over his own conclusions, and verified them by pri- 
mitive testimony and Catholic consent. 

" The Scriptures," he says, " as being indited by 
the Spirit of God, do contain the best and soundest 
words that possibly could be invented, whereby to 
express such truths as are necessary for mankind to 
believe or know." _Yet, he points out that " there 
never was any error, heresy, or schism in the Church, 
but was pretended by the authors and abettors of it 
to be grounded upon Scripture." And this result, 
he says, has followed partly from then being igno- 
rant of the original languages in which the Scriptures 
were written, partly from their being unacquainted 
with " the rites and customs of the Jewish Church," 
partly from the mysterious nature of the doctrines 
contained in the Scriptures, and partly from the 
moral and spiritual dispositions of those who have 
studied the Bible. " Such," he says, " is the weak- 



86 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



ness of men's understandings, such the corruption of 
their judgments, such the perverseness of their wills, 
the disorder of their affections, and the pravity of 
their whole souls, that they extract poison from that 
which was intended for their food, draw error out of 
truth, heresy out of the Scriptures themselves, so as 
to learn to blaspheme God in His own words. But 
what, then, shall we do in this case ? How can we 
be ever certain that the words we use in matters of 
religion be sound, and, by consequence, our opinions 
orthodox, and our sentiments of God and those 
eternal truths which He hath revealed to us, such as 
He Himself would have them ? Why, surely for 
this end it is necessary that we indulge not our own 
fancies, nor idolise our own private opinions, but 
- hold fast the form of sound words ' delivered to us 
in the Holy Scriptures, in that sense which the 
Catholic Church in all ages hath put upon them." * 

In these words we have the key to Beveridge's 
whole position, as a student of Holy Scripture, as a 
theologian, as a Churchman. How he was fashioned 
by circumstances, by the grace of God, by his own 
earnest labours, to be the man he was, we shall pre- 
sently see. It is at this point important to note that 
he was, in his convictions, in his teaching, in his 
life and work, thoroughly consistent from beginning 
to end. His devotion to the English Church, his 



* Serm. VI., " Form of Sound Words," 1 Works,' vol. i. p 111 sq. 



BEVEKIDGE. 



87 



labours as a parish priest, his resolute antagonism to 
Eomanism on the one hand and to Puritanism on the 
other, are all explained by his views of the method 
of ascertaining the nature of Divine truth. Thus, 
speaking of the Church of England, he says : — " For 
our Church, as to its doctrine as well as discipline, 
is settled upon so firm a basis, so truly Catholic, 
that none can oppose what she teacheth, without 
denying, not only the Scriptures, but the Scrip- 
tures as interpreted by the Universal Church. 
So that we may justly challenge all the world to 
show us any one point or article of faith wherein our 
Church differs from the Catholic in all ages, since 
the Apostles' days, which, I think, is more than can 
be said of any other national Church in the whole 
world, there being no other, that I know of, which 
keeps to the form of sound words delivered in 
Scripture, as interpreted by the Universal Church, 
so firmly and constantly as ours doth."* 

Hence his opinion of the Eoman Communion : — 
" The Church of Eome hath of late degenerated so 
far from the doctrine and practice of the Primitive 
and Universal Church, that they who live in her 
communion, do commonly perform the same acts 
of religious worship to creatures which they clo to 
the great Creator of the world, ' God blessed for 
ever.' This we justly condemn them for, as judging 



* Serai. VI., " Form of Sound Words." 



88 



CLASSIC PKEACHERS: 



it one of the greatest sins that a Church or person 
can be guilty of. But in the midst of this our just 
zeal against the Papists for giving as much worship 
to creatures as they do to the Creator, we must have 
a care of falling into the other extreme, even of 
giving no more worship to our Creator than what may 
be given to a creature ; which is the great fault of 
too many among us.* 

Equally clear were his utterances against Puritan- 
ism. "And as for schism, they certainly hazard 
their salvation at a strange rate, who separate them- 
selves from such a Church as ours is, wherein the 
Apostolical succession, the root of all Christian com- 
munion, hath been so entirely preserved, and the 
Word and Sacraments are so effectively administered. 

. . . And therefore, to speak modestly, they must 
needs run a very great hazard who cut themselves 
off from ours, and by consequence from the Catholic 
Church, and so render themselves incapable of re- 
ceiving any benefit from this promise, or from the 
means of grace which they do or may enjoy." And 
yet he was no formalist, for he goes on : " But when 
I speak of your continuing firm and faithful to our 
Church, I do not mean that you should only talk 
high for her, much less inveigh against her adver- 
saries, or damn all those who are not of her 
communion ; for this is contrary to the Divine and 

* Serm. V., "On the True Notion of Religious Worship," vol. i. 
p. 88. 



BEVEEIDGE. 



89 



Apostolic spirit that is in her, which is a spirit of 
meekness, and soberness, and charity. But my 
meaning is that you firmly believe whatsoever she, 
from the Word of God, propounds as an article of 
faith, and faithfully perform whatever she, from the 
same Word, requires as a necessary duty to God or 
man. . . . And oh ! that all we who are here present, 
and all that profess to be of our Church, wheresoever 
they are, would for the future do so ! What an holy, 
what a happy people we should then be ! How pious 
towards God, how loyal to our Sovereign, how just 
and charitable towards all men ! . . . Then our Lord 
Himself would delight to dwell amongst us, and be 
always present with us, not only by His spirit, but 
likewise by His power too. And if He be with us, 
we need not fear what flesh can do against us." * 

We have thus learned to understand the theological 
position of Beveridge. Before we attempt more fully 
to comprehend the preacher, we must try to make 
acquaintance with the man ; for we must remember, 
— and it is a solemn truth for priests and people, — 
it is the man who preaches, it is the inner life of the 
speaker that comes forth in his words, and determines 
their value and their power, or their unreality and 
their weakness. 

The recorded incidents of Beveridge's life are few, 
and they are not striking. He was born early in the 



* Semi. L, " Christ's Presence with His Ministers," vol. i. p. 23. 



90 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



year 1636 (N.S. 1637) * in the parish of Barrow- 
upon-Soar, in Leicestershire, of which parish his father 
was vicar. The troubles which led to the Civil War 
and to the Commonwealth were in full progress. In 
the year of his birth, Laud's Liturgy was introduced 
into Scotland. In the following year Hampden was 
condemned for his refusal to pay the ship-money. 
He was a boy of twelve when the King's head fell on 
the block at Whitehall. His father had died, and 
another of the same name, perhaps an uncle, had 
been deprived by the sequestrators. In the year 
1653 he entered S. John's College, Cambridge, the 
same year, and within a month of the time when 
Cromwell dissolved the Long Parliament. We can 
imagine the thoughts which were moving in the mind 
of the young Churchman when he became a member 
of the University. Here the influences under which 
he was placed were all opposed to the teachings of 
his childhood. Dr. Tuckney, the master of his 
College, was a distinguished Puritan and Calvinist; 
he was one of the Presbyterian divines at the Savoy 
Conference, after the Restoration. Beveridge was 
not contented to abandon his hereditary faith, nor 
was he satisfied to hold it with mere unreasoning 
constancy. He addicted himself with devotion and 



* The Oxford Editor has 1638. 
Through the kindness of the 
present Vicar of Barrow, the 
Rev. W. Newham, I have been 



able to verify the date. The 
birthday is unknown ; Beveridge 
was baptized Feb. 21st. 



BEVEEIDGE. 



91 



success to the study of oriental languages, of Holy 
Scripture, of the early records of the History of the 
Church. Before he was twenty he had written a 
grammar of the Syriac language. The fruits of his 
patristic and ecclesiastical studies were afterwards 
given to the world in his works on the Apostolical 
Canons and the decrees of the early Councils.* These 
works have indeed been in great measure superseded ; 
but they contributed in no slight degree to advance 
those deeply interesting and important studies, and 
they are still quoted with respect by the most recent 
labourers in the same field. Beve ridge felt in his 
day, as we feel now, that if the position of the Church 
of England is unassailable, it is because she stands 
firm upon Holy Scripture, primitive testimony, 
Catholic consent. It is this conviction which makes 
his utterances so clear, decided, unwavering. He 
was not only convinced, but he knew well the grounds 
on which his convictions were based. 

But he was not a mere scholar and theologian ; he 
was a devout Christian, and all his studies were con- 
ducted to the end that he might more perfectly know 
the will of God, in order that he might acquaint 
himself with Him, love Him, and serve Him. His 
' Private Thoughts,' written for his own use early in 

* The 'Pandectse ' appeared in | informed me, Beveridge was the 
1672 ; the ' Codex Canonum ' in I only English divine who was 
1679. It is a curious illustration I known to Philaret, Archbishop 
of the influence of these books, | of Moscow, 
that, as the Dean of Westminster ( 



92 CLASSIC PKEACHERS: 

life, although not published until after his death, are 
an abiding testimony to the reality, the depth, the 
warmth of his devotion. Thus prepared in heart and 
mind, he had attained to the age of twenty-three at 
the time of the Kestoration, and was in the following 
year (1661) ordained deacon and priest, and insti- 
tuted to the Yicarage of Ealing. 

Eleven years afterwards, in 1672, he was ap- 
pointed rector of S. Peter's, Cornhill, in which office 
he spent the best part of his life, a period of no 
less than thirty years. It was here, therefore, that 
the great work of his life was done ; and it is in this 
work that we naturally look for an illustration of 
those principles of which he was the consistent 
advocate. Nor do we look in vain. 

At the very beginning of his ministry he set 
before his new parishioners that which was the con- 
stant theme of his teaching, " holiness the great end 
of the Christian dispensation;" and he showed them 
that, however ardent his Churchmanship, however 
staunch his orthodoxy, no result but this could satisfy 
him, that they should be a pattern to others for piety 
and true holiness. " How happy should I think 
myself," he exclaims, " if it would please God to 
make me, the un worthiest of His servants, an instru- 
ment in His almighty hand towards the effecting 
of it in this place!" 

Beveridge had formed to himself a distinct and 
lofty ideal of the Christian life which he would cul- 



BEYEEIDGE. 



93 



tivate in himself, and which he strove to produce in 
others. It was, to use his own expression, "the 
exemplary holiness of the primitive Christians," that 
he proposed to his people as their model ; and he 
taught them that such a character could be attained 
only by the use of those means which the primitive 
Christians employed. For this reason he always laid 
great stress upon regular, devout, and frequent atten- 
dance at the table of the Lord. On this subject his 
admonitions are earnest and repeated. Thus, speaking 
of the Holy Communion, he says : " This sacrament 
supplies the defect of all the Levitical sacrifices, the 
paschal lamb, the sin-offerings, the trespass-offerings, 
the peace-offerings, the thank-offerings, the whole 
burnt-offerings, they are all now laid aside, and this 
one substituted in their place, of more power and 
efficacy to the ends for which they were ordained 
than all they put together ; for they only foreshowed 
Christ's death until it happened, this shows it forth 
to the end of the world ; for, as the Apostle saith, 
' As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, 
ye do show the Lord's death till he come.' "... 

" It is true," he goes on, " He hath prescribed no 
set times for it, as he did for the sacrifices under the 
law ; yet, however, seeing it comes in their place, it 
ought to bear some proportion with them in this 
respect, at least so far, that as they, besides their daily, 
had their weekly sacrifices more than ordinary upon 
the Sabbath-day ; so we should celebrate this Holy 



94 



CLASSIC PREACHEKS : 



Sacrament once a week upon the Lord's Day, as we 
find the Apostles did. . . . 

" Especially considering the mighty benefits and 
advantages that accrue to us by a due and worthy 
receiving of this Holy Sacrament. Hereby we are 
put in mind of the sinfulness of sin, and the dread- 
ful punishments which are due unto it, seeing 
nothing less than the blood of the Son of God could 
expiate it. Hereby our minds are set against it, and 
our whole souls are taught to abhor and loathe it. 
Hereby we exercise our faith in Christ, for the 
pardon of all our faults, and have them accordingly 
pardoned to us ; hereby we wash ourselves over 
again, as it were, in the blood of the Lamb of God, 
which cleanseth us from all sin ; hereby we derive 
power and virtue fronr Christ, to withstand the 
temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil ; 
.and to serve God with a perfect heart and a willing 
mind ; hereby we dwell in Christ and Christ in us."* 

In another Sermon,! speaking on the same subject, 
he exclaims : " Blessed be God for it, you have the 
same opportunity as they had of receiving the Holy 
Sacrament every Lord's Day, and therefore be ad- 
vised to follow their example, in being constantly 
at it, or at least as often as you possibly can ; do not 
let every little trifling worldly business deprive you 



* Serm. LIV., "Universal 
Obedience," vol. iii. p. 46. 

f Serm. LI., " Steadfastness to 



the Established Church," vol. ii. 
p. 440. 



BEVERIDGE. 



95 



of tlie greatest blessing you can have on tliis side 
heaven. " 

From one of his most remarkable sermons, that 
on " the exemplary holiness of the primitive 
Christians."* as well as from contemporary testi- 
mony, we learn that these exhortations had not been 
in vain. "In the place." he says. e< where I had the 
honour to serve God at His altar, before He called 
me hither, I administered it every Lord's Day for 
above twentv years together, and was so far from 
ever wanting communicants, that I had always as 
many as I and two curates could well administer 
it to them; for people fonnd such extraordinary 
benefit and ghostly comfort from it. that they 
never thought they could receive it often enough ; 
and the oftener they received it the more they still 
desired it." 

The effect of his teaching, his example, his labours, 
among the people of his parish, soon became con- 
spicuous. " He applied himself," it is said, i: with 
the utmost labour and zeal to the discharge of his 
ministry in its several parts and offices ; and so 
instructive was he in his discourse, from the pulpit, 
so warm and affectionate in his private exhortations, 
so regular and uniform in the public worship of the 
Church, and in every part of his pastoral functions, 
and so remarkably were his labours crowned with 
success, that as he himself was justly styled the 6 great 

* Seira. OIL vol. iv. p. 448. 



96 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



reviver and restorer of primitive piety/ so his parish 
was deservedly proposed as the best model and 
pattern for the rest of its neighbours to copy 
after." * 

While Kector of S. Peter's, he was made succes- 
sively Prebendary of S. Paul's (1674), Archdeacon 
of Colchester (1681), and Prebendary of Canterbury 
(1684). The same zeal which he showed in his 
parish he carried into the work of his Archdeaconry. 
Doubtful, and reasonably doubtful, of the accuracy 
of Churchwardens' reports, he visited in person 
every parish in his district, taking an exact account 
of its condition and necessities. 

When at Canterbury he gave a remarkable ex- 
ample of his somewhat severe Churchmanship. King 
James II. had ordered a brief to be read for the re- 
lief of the persecuted French Protestants. Whether 
because of his imperfect sympathy with the object 
of the appeal, or because he really doubted of the 
legality of such a notice, Beveridge objected that 
it was not sanctioned by the rubrics. It was on 
this occasion that Tillotson, who was then Dean of 
Canterbury, addressed to him the well-known taunt, 
" Doctor, doctor, Charity is above rubrics ! " 

It is not unlikely, however, that he was beginning 
to see that King James's new-born zeal for toleration 
was used only as a means of restoring the papal 

* ' Biographia Britannica,' and preface to his (posthumously pub- 
lished) ' Private Thoughts.' 



BEVEEIDGE. 



97 



power in England. We know, at least, that he was 
about this time the member of a society which met 
in private for consultation on this subject, and for 
prayer that such an evil might be averted. 

At the revolution, he did not hesitate to take the 
oath of allegiance to William and Mary, and was 
shortly afterwards (1690) made one of the King's 
chaplains. He was also a prominent member of 
Convocation, and took an active part in the debates 
on the subject of the concessions which were pro- 
posed to be made for the reconciliation of the 
Puritans. Beveridge was not unwilling to meet the 
party with which he had little personal or eccle- 
siastical sympathy ; but he strenuously opposed any 
surrender of what he regarded as principle. Before 
the Convocation of 1689 he " preached a Latin 
Sermon,* in which he warmly eulogised the existing 
system, and yet declared himself favourable to a 
moderate reform. Ecclesiastical laws, he said, were 
of two kinds. Some laws were fundamental and 
eternal ; they derived their authority from God ; 
nor could any religious community abrogate them 
without ceasing to form a part of the universal 
Church. Other laws were local and temporary. 
They had been framed by human wisdom, and might 
be altered by human wisdom. They ought not, in- 
deed, to be altered without grave reasons. But surely, 
at that moment, such reasons were not wanting. 



* This summary is from Lord Alucnulay's ' li istory,' chap. xiv. 
[sr. james's.] H 



98 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



To unite a scattered flock in one fold under one 
shepherd, to remove stumbling-blocks from the path 
of the weak, to reconcile hearts long estranged, to 
restore spiritual discipline to its primitive vigour, 
to place the best and purest of Christian Societies on 
a base broad enough to stand against all the attacks 
of earth and hell, these were objects which might 
well justify some modification, not of Catholic insti- 
tutions, but of national or provincial usages." 

In 1691, on Ken's refusal to take the oath of alle- 
giance, Beveridge was offered the bishopric of Bath 
and Wells. His conduct on this occasion has been 
greatly misunderstood ; Macaulay speaks of him as 
being " though an honest, not a strong-minded man; " 
yet the explanation of his indecision and of his final 
resolution to decline the office, is very simple. On 
the one hand, Beveridge had no doubt of the lawful- 
ness of accepting the appointment from King William, 
as he had already taken the oaths : on the other 
hand, he was unwilling to sit on the throne from 
which the saintly Ken had been thrust out. After 
considerable hesitation, by the advice of Archbishop 
Sancroft, he refused the bishopric. His scrupulosity 
did not protect him from the attacks of the pam- 
phleteers of his day ; but there are few who will now 
refuse to do honour to the motives by which he was 
influenced. It will not at least be denied that he 
relinquished a post of honour and dignity, and he 
seems, besides, to have forfeited the favour of the 



BEYERIDGE. 



99 



King, for he was offered no further promotion until 
the reign of Queen Anne. 

By this Queen he was in 1704, when he was 
already sixty-seven years of age, promoted to the See 
of S. Asaph, where he laboured for about four years 
with the same apostolic zeal and fervour which he 
had shown in a less elevated position. " He was no 
sooner exalted to the Episcopal Chair," says the 
editor of the ' Private Thoughts,' " but in a most 
pathetic and obliging letter to the clergy of his 
diocese, he recommended to them * the duty of cate- 
chising and instructing the people committed to their 
charge, in the principles of the Christian religion ; 
to the end they might know what they were to 
believe and do in order to salvation ; ' and told them 
' he thought it necessary to begin with that without 
which, whatever else he or they should do, would 
turn to little or no account, as to the main end of 
the ministry.' And to enable them to do this the 
more effectually, he sent them a plain and easy ' ex- 
position upon the Church Catechism.' " 

He died at his lodging in the Cloisters of West- 
minster Abbey, on the 5th of March, 1707 (N.S. 
1708) ; and was buried in S. Paul's Cathedral. He 
died as he had lived, with a heart full of love to God 
and man, and with an unwavering devotion to the 
Church in which he had ministered. After making 
a certain provision for his relatives, he left the bulk 
of his property to the recently-founded Gospel Pro- 

H 2 



100 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



pagation Society and Christian Knowledge Society ; 
but his zeal for the Church had not made him forget- 
ful of the needs of the people among whom he was 
born. To eight of the poor housekeepers of Barrow 
he left forty shillings a year, to be distributed equally 
among them on Christmas Eve, regard being had in 
the selection to those who had been most constant at 
prayers, and at the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper 
the foregoing year ; and to the Curacy of Mount 
Sorrel and Vicarage of Barrow he bequeathed twenty 
pounds a year for ever, on condition that Morning 
and Evening Prayer should be read daily in the 
chapel and parish church ; and if it should so happen 
that this provision should not be carried out, then 
his bequest was to be applied for the instruction of 
children in the principles of the Christian religion, 
according to the doctrine of the Church of England. 

Such was Bishop Beveridge as a man, a Christian 
a teacher of the Christian faith. But the question 
may still be asked as to the rank which may fairly 
be conceded to him among the great preachers of 
past times. On this point opinions will always differ ; 
but an impartial judgment will not refuse him a high 
place among the faithful, the earnest, the eloquent 
witnesses for Divine truth. 

It is true that he was not free from some of the 
faults of his age. He may have committed himself 
to statements on the subject of human reason and 
its relation to Divine revelation which we could not 



BEVERIDGE. 



101 



accept. He has been accused of High Calvinism ; 
but a candid examination of his writings will not 
support the charge. On some occasions, indeed, he 
was carried away by his feelings to forget the solemn 
caution of Christ against supposing that the greatest 
sufferers were the greatest sinners. He compares 
King Charles, without any apparent misgiving, to 
the Proto-Martyr, S. Stephen.* He does not hesi- 
tate to declare that the Fire of London was sent as a 
punishment for the great rebellion and the murder 
of the King, in which the City had so great a part.f 
These may have been faults of taste and judgment ; 
but they will not be greatly regarded in a general 
estimate of his work. 

A German writer, who speaks highly of his books 
on the Canons, says his religious writings are of small 
value ; and a French author tells us that his sermons 
have nothing very extraordinary in point of profun- 
dity of ideas. This may be in a measure true, and 
we can hardly put him in the very highest rank of 
preachers. He had not the gorgeous imagination 
of Taylor, or the polished eloquence of Massillon, 
or the eagle wing of Bossuet. Those, moreover, who 
regard florid language, heaped-up metaphors, or 
flights of fancy as a necessary adjunct to true 
eloquence, will deny that he was eloquent. But 
those who judge by truer canons of criticism, will 



* Serm. IV. of " Sermons on particular Occasions," vol. vi. p. 
432 sq. t Serm. LXXXVL, vol. iv. p. 154 sq. 



102 



classic preachers: 



acknowledge that he was not destitute of this great 
gift of God. 

If well-ordered thoughts expressed in language, 
pure, simple, and fervent, spoken by a tongue whose 
every utterance was truth and goodness, kindled by 
the glowing fire of love to God and to man ; if these 
things constitute eloquence, then Beveridge must 
have been eloquent. " He had a way," said the 
pious Eobert Nelson, in his life of Bishop Bull, " of 
gaining people's hearts and touching their con- 
sciences, which bore some resemblance to the 
Apostolic age ; and, when it shall appear that those 
bright preachers, who have been ready to throw 
contempt upon his Lordship's performances, can set 
forth as large a list of persons whom they have con- 
verted by their preaching, as I could produce of 
those who owed the change of their lives, under 
God, to the instructions of this pious prelate, I shall 
readily own that they are superior to his Lordship in 
the pulpit ; though, considering what learned works 
he published in the cause of religion, and what an 
eminent pattern he was of true primitive piety, I am 
not inclined to think that his Lordship will, upon the 
whole of his character, be easily equalled by any one." 

Even if we cannot go so far as a contemporary 
writer* who quotes a passage from one of his Sermons, 
which may, he says, "in acuteness of judgment, 



* ' Guardian,' No. 71 June 5, 1713. 



BEVERIDGE. 



103 



ornament of speech, and true sublime, compare 
with any of the choicest writings of the ancient 
Fathers," we shall hardly quarrel with the testimony 
of another,* who says : " There is something so great, 
primitive, and apostolical, in his writings, that it 
creates an awe and veneration in our mind ; the im- 
portance of his subjects is above the decoration of 
words; and what is great and majestical in itself, 
looketh the most like itself the less it is adorned." 

It would be easy, did our time permit, to give 
multitudes of examples of the homely directness, 
the serious and affectionate earnestness, the powerful 
incisiveness, with which he appeals to the consciences 
of his hearers, now warning them of the danger of 
impenitence, and again setting forth the fatherly 
love and mercy and grace of Almighty God. 

Take, for example, the beginning of his Sermon on 
"the exemplary holiness of the primitive Christians," 
as a specimen of his plain and direct dealing with 
the conscience of his hearers. 

" Having this opportunity of preaching the word 
of God to you, I heartily wish that I could do it so 
effectually, that by His blessing upon it, ye may all 
be the better for it in this life and the next; for 
otherwise my preaching will be in vain ; and your 
hearing also will be in vain ; and so it always will 



* Dr. H. Felton, ' Dissertation on Beading the Classics, and 
forming a just Style.' 



104 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



be, unless, when you hear the word, you receive it, 
as the Thessalonians did, ' not as the word of men, 
but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectu- 
ally worketh also in you that believe.' " 

Towards the end of the same Sermon, he goes on : 
" This, therefore, is that which I would now persuade 
you all to do, and should think myself happy if I 
could do it. Play no longer with religion, as people 
commonly do, but set upon the practice of it in good 
earnest. As ye profess to believe the Gospel, live 
according to the rules and precepts of it, that ye 
may adorn your holy profession with a suitable con- 
versation. . . . Strive all ye can to shine as lights 
in the world, that ye may be the great examples of 
true piety and virtue to one another, and to all that 
are about you. This would be the most effectual 
means to convince the enemies of our Church and 
holy religion of their errors and mistakes, when they 
see you who profess it, so far exceeding and outdoing 
them in your constancy at your devotions, in your 
frequency at the Holy Communion ; in your temper- 
ance and sobriety ; in your meekness, patience, and 
humility ; in your truth and justice, in all your 
dealings together ; in your liberality to your poor 
brethren ; in your zeal for God ; in your loyalty to 
your Sovereign ; in your kindness, love, and charity 
to one another ; and in all such good works as God 
hath prepared for you in your several places and 
callings to walk in ; still trusting in your blessed 



BEYEKIDGE. 



105 



Saviour, both for His assistance of you in what ye 
do, and for Grod's acceptance of it when it is done. 

" This is the way, too, to have a place ready pre- 
pared for you in heaven against your departure out 
of this wicked world, that you may live together with 
the glorified saints and angels and with Christ Him- 
self, in all ease and plenty, in all the joy, happiness, 
and glory that creatures are capable of, not only for 
some time, but to all eternity, and all through His 
merits and mediation for you."* 

It would be easy to multiply examples of the 
application of his subject, which must have been 
not simply what we call effective, but most deeply 
impressive. Let us take only one other example 
from his Sermon on the " wisdom of being holy." 
The text of the Sermon is, " The fear of the Lord is 
the beginning of wisdom " Men and brethren, I 
have endeavoured to show and prove this day, that 
every sinner is a fool, and every sin a folly. I know 
there are many understanding persons among you 
who have heard what hath been said upon this 
subject ; some, I hope, who are wise towards God 
understanding the things that appertain to their 
everlasting peace, and such, I am sure, cannot but 
acknowledge the truth of what they have heard. 
Others, I fear, may be wise enough for the world, 
understanding how to manage their trades to the 



* Serm. CII., vol. iv. pp. 441-452. 



106 



CLASSIC PKEACHEES: 



best advantage, and how to make a good bargain as 
well as the best ; and such can hardly be persuaded 
that they are fools in anything, because they think 
themselves to be wise in some things. To such my 
humble advice is, that you would seriously weigh 
what ye have heard, and not sutler yourselves to be 
fooled into a vain conceit of your own wisdom ; for 
assure yourselves there is not the ignorantest person 
in the congregation that fears God, but is far wiser 
than the wisest of you that do not ; for such a one's 
little knowledge is true wisdom, your great cunning 
is your real folly ; and therefore, if you would mani- 
fest yourselves for the future to be wise and prudent 
persons indeed, lay aside your former follies, and 
devote yourself wholly to the fear and service of 
Almighty G-od, for till you do so, you have not at- 
tained to the very first degree of wisdom, ' for the 
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' " * 

It may be that these words seem but cold and 
feeble when repeated in this day by other lips ; but 
I am persuaded that few could have heard them 
spoken by the lips of him who penned them, ani- 
mated by the spirit which dwelt within him, without 
being, for the moment at least, wiser and better men, 
without some resolve forming itself within them, 
however transient and evanescent, henceforth to live 
less to the world and self, and more to God. 



* Serm. XCVIIL, vol. iv. p. 389. 



BEVEEIDGE. 



107 



If we do not propose Beveridge as a model for 
imitation, it is because we do not believe that any 
preacher can be, in the strict sense of the word, a 
model for another ; it is because he belongs to an age 
with which our own can, at best, have but partial 
sympathy. If, however, we look beyond the cir- 
cumstances of place and time, if we penetrate to 
the life and spirit of the man, then there is hardly 
a characteristic of his life or teaching which the 
Christian preacher would not do well to imitate. 

In his patient toil for the acquisition of sacred 
knowledge, in the entire devotion of his heart and 
soul and life to the service of God, in his deep 
realisation of the Divine presence and grace, in his 
fervent love for souls, in the manly simplicity of his 
language, in the subordination of all his teaching to 
the salvation of men and the glory of God, he is 
worthy of earnest study and imitation. Happy will 
it be for the Church of England when she has many 
preachers and pastors like William Beveridge ; still 
more happy when she has multitudes of children 
who thankfully receive such teaching and submit to 
such guidance ! 



/ 

WILSON, 



THE SAINTLY PEE ACHER. 



" Lord who shall dwell in thy tabernacle, or who shall rest upon 
thy holy hill ? Even he that leadeth an uncormpt life, and doeth 
the thing that is right, and speaketh the truth from his heart." — 
Psalm xv. 1, 2. 



The glory of the Saints of God — Contrast between Thomas "Wilson 
and Jonathan Swift — Wilson as Tutor and Chaplain — His aver- 
sion to Pluralities— His work as a Bishop — His attempts to 
restore ecclesiastical discipline — His severe trials — Imprisoned 
in Castle Rushen — The Bishop at Court — His last days — His 
"Works— General characteristics of his Sermons — Absence of any 
allusions to Xature, History, or contemporary events — His in- 
feriority to the great Preachers of the Seventeenth Century — 
Moral deadness of the Eighteenth Century — Wilson's sincerity 
— Behind the Sermons stood the Man — His life and example lend 
preciousness to his "Works. 

As the life and death of each separate coral insect 
adds to the noiseless growth of the reef, which ulti- 
mately becomes an island or a continent, so does the 
life and death of each individual man add its per- 
manent quota to those vast accumulations of ex- 
perience and impulse which determine the conditions 
of humanity. He and his work may seem alike to 
perish; but just as no particle of matter can be 
destroyed, but only be caught up in the magic eddy 



110 



CLASSIC PEEACHEKS: 



of nature to be recombined in new forms with other 
elements ; — and just as no force can be finally ex- 
hausted, but remains impressed for ever on the 
material universe ; — so even the obscurest man who 
has ever lived has exercised a real influence, be it 
ever so infinitesimal, on the mighty whole of the 
human race. Some men have directed the great 
movements which alter the relations of kingdoms; 
some men have materially modified the physical 
conditions of the globe ; some men, by their inven- 
tions, have given new developments to the aims and 
labours of mankind — have, by their works of art, 
haunted our imagination, or by their writings en- 
riched our thoughts. But, among all these, none 
have a stronger claim to universal gratitude than 
those Saints of God who have kindled their names 
like beacon-lights upon the hills, to show to what 
lofty regions the foot of man can reach, what pure 
air the life of man can breathe. Others have im- 
proved the conditions of living ; these have enhanced 
the blessedness of life itself. Others have brightened 
the gloom of things seen and temporal ; these have 
fixed our hearts on the things unseen and eternal. 
And such was he of whom I am to-clay bidden to 
speak. The transcendent merit of Thomas Wilson, 
Bishop of Sodor and Man, is that in an age of god- 
lessness he was pre-eminently a Saint of God. He 
was not a man of genius ; he was not a man of great 

* See Mr. M. Arnold's ' Last Essay on Keligion/ p. 71. 



WILSON. 



Ill 



attainments ; lie was not a man of keen sagacity ; he 
was not a remarkable orator ; he was not a dis- 
tinguished author ; but he was something higher 
and better than if he had been all these at once, for 
he was " the last survivor," if not " of the saints," * 
yet certainly of the saints of the English Church — 
the last of those too few in number, in our Eeformed 
Communion, on whom that glorious title can be 
bestowed. 

Thomas Wilson was born of humble but pious 
parentage, at Neston in Cheshire, in the year 1663. 
He was educated at Chester, and entered the Uni- 
versity of Dublin, at the age of eighteen, with a 
sizarship of £20 a year. In the same term was 
entered a boy of fourteen, whose name was Jonathan 
Swift. It is a tradition that they knew each other, 
and that, in after years, the Bishop of Sodor and 
Man declined a present of some of his works from 
the Dean of St. Patrick's.* But what a contrast was 
there between the careers and characters of these 
two youths ! The one a man of colossal genius, 
destined to become an intense politician, a scathing 
satirist, a terrific pamphleteer, with all the fame of 
those who mould the policy of empires ; and yet the 
most miserable of men ; doomed to break the hearts 
of those that loved him — to be lacerated by a savage 
indignation, which vented itself in raging sarcasm — 
to pollute the sacred page of literature with mis- 

* ' Life,' by Keble, vol i. p. 13. 



112 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES '. 



anthropy and filth ; a man who had fought with the 
wild beasts of fury, and envy, and want, and hate, 
and who bore in every limb the bleeding marks of 
the horrid contest ; a man who seems ever to have 
heard, around his head, the scream of malignant 
harpies, and the convulsive flap of their obscene 
funereal wings, and who, " dying at the top like a 
blighted tree," expired at last in agony and madness, 
" a driveller and a show." The other, a man of very 
modest capacity, of small literary influence, of no 
political weight ; who lived, not in the blaze of fame 
and publicity, but in the deep valley and shadow of re- 
tirement ; — but whose character was one of heavenly 
sweetness ; whose whole labours were for the good of 
his fellow-men ; who loved and honoured them as 
sincerely as Swift despised and loathed ; who broke 
no loving hearts, but bound up many a wounded 
one ; and who, not tormented as Swift was by the 
horrors of memory, and so " dying in a rage like a 
poisoned rat in a hole," * passed away amid the tears 
of sorrowing thousands, and carried his white hairs, 
like a crown of glory, to a happy and a deeply 
honoured grave. Could two careers of schoolfellows 
be more different ? — the one like a glaring meteor, 
plunging through storm and the w 7 rath of the elements 
into the twilight, into the evening, into the black 
dark night ; the other a sweet and shining dawn, 
that brightened more and more unto the perfect day. 



* Swift's Letter to Bolingbroke, 1 Works,' vol. xvii. p. 274. 



WILSON. 



113 



After a blameless but undistinguished college 
career, in the year 1686 Wilson was ordained : and 
the exquisite prayer which he yearly used on the 
anniversary of his ordination, — "Give me, Lord 
God, I humbly beg, a sober, a patient, an under- 
standing, a devout, a religious, and courageous 
heart. . . ." * — may serve as an epitome of the spirit 
of his life. In the same year he was appointed 
curate of New Church on £30 a year, and from that 
time, if not before, he always, to the end of his life, 
set aside one-tenth of his income for the poor. In 
1692 he became chaplain to Lord Derby, and tutor 
to his son, Lord Strange. We know from history 
how low r was the position of domestic chaplains, and, 
indeed, of the clergy generally, in the eighteenth 
century, and how basely complaisant was too often 
their tone and conduct ; and I fear that there were 
very few among them who would have shown the 
courage which Mr. Wilson did, in venturing to drop 
hot sealing-wax on Lord Strange's hand when he 
was about to sign a document which he had not 
read, and even to rebuke his noble patron for ex- 
travagance and neglect of his affairs. There, too, 
he first set to his age the rare example of re- 
fusing to hold a living at which he could not 
reside. t So far from resenting his manly rebuke, 



* See the whole of this beauti- 
ful prayer, 'Life,' vol. i. pp. 26, 27. 
t He had made a vow that 

[ST. JAMES'S.] 



he would never hold two ecclesi- 
astical preferments with cure of 
souls. — 1 Life,' vol. i. p. 65. 

I 



114 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



Lord Derby, the very next year, compelled him, 
in spite of his most sincere nolo episcopari, to 
become Bishop of Sodor and Man. It was so poor a 
bishopric * that all Wilson's predecessors had been 
only too glad to supplement its poverty by an Eng- 
lish benefice ; but Wilson, on being again offered 
the living of Badworth, in Yorkshire, again set to a 
corrupt and worldly Church the higher example of 
refusing it — " strange and highnown " as his scruples 
must then have seemed. Accordingly he was made 
Doctor of Laws by Archbishop Tenison, consecrated 
Bishop, and in 1698, after a sail which occupied four 
days, landed in the little diocese where he was to 
rule for no less than eight-and-fifty years. The 
prayer which he wrote on April 11, 1698, the day of 
his enthronement, is well worth study, as showing 
alike the spirit on which he entered upon his new 
and sacred duties, and the spirit in which, by God's 
help, he was enabled to fulfil them to the last, f 

The scene of his future labours was a poor and 
lonely place, and the house, which had been for six 
years uninhabited, was in great decay 4 But it was 



* When Dr. Barwick had been 
most affectionately besought by 
Lord Derby to accept it, Lord 
Clarendon had written, " I can- 
not blame you for not being 



f ' Life,' vol. i. p. 96. 

X On the acquittal of the 
Seven Bishops, his predecessor, 
Bishop Levinz, had written to 
Archbishop Sancroft, " This 



desirous to accept the Bishopric ! good news will make me goe 
of Man, which if you shall do, ' with more cheerfulness into the 
nobody would accuse you of Long Saile I am now going to in 
ambition." my Patmos, as your Grace usu- 



WILSON. 



115 



with no thoughts of gloom and discontent — it was 
not only with no desire for preferment in England, 
but even with a determination not to take it, — that 
Bishop Wilson landed in his little Patmos. fie 
meant to make this his home, there to live and there 
to die. There he married, there his children were 
born, and there he lived for fifty years a widower. 
He threw himself with love and diligence into all his 
duties. He preached, he visited, he practised a free 
and genial hospitality ; he indulged his benevolent 
heart in the largest charity ; he built ; he planted ; 
he restored churches ; he improved the agriculture 
of the island ; he promoted parochial libraries ; he 
made efforts to found colleges, and elevate the theo- 
logical standard of his clergy; he drew up the 
' Principles and Duties of Christianity,' the first book 
in the Manx language ; he laboured in season and 
out of season, and won the love of all good and 
honest men. Even in his brief visits to England he 
supported charity schools at a time when they were 

ally stiles it, where all the com- he has "a title too bigge for his 
fort I can procure myself is this scant fortunes to maintain ;" and 
topique only, that there I may again he speaks of Bishopscourt 
have time enough for my prayers as "a disconsolate residence," 
— since that poor desolate place j and describes " the terrible 
will hardly afford me any other storms, tempests, and prodigious 
than He to converse with." He winds and inundations of rayne 
then begs for "a House and of which he has never seen the 
Prebend att Winchester," or like, and if there are these in 
something similar, to prevent summer what he is to expect 
the necessity of his wintering in j in winter God alone knows." — 
the severe clime of Man, because j ' Life,' vol. i. p. 98-101. 

I 2 



116 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



still regarded with selfish suspicion ; and was, to his 
immortal honour, among the earliest founders of 
institutions so excellent as the Societies for the 
Propagation of the Gospel, and the Promotion of 
Christian Knowledge. But his main work, and his 
constant residence, was at Bishopscourt. Tuta et 
parvula — " safe and very small " — was the motto in 
which he described his little diocese, and to which he 
remained faithful to the end.* 

And let it not be supposed for a moment that 
he was influenced by so ignoble a motive as love of 
ease. The little island was much more of a thistle 
than a rose. Its bleak atmosphere, its scanty popu- 
lation, its ignorant clergy, its deep poverty, its entire 
isolation, might have been easily borne by one whose 
sole aim in life was faithfully to cultivate the little 
corner of the vineyard which God had entrusted to 
him. But this was far from all. Bishop Wilson was 
a High Churchman with a sincere belief in ecclesi- 
astical discipline, and this discipline he carried out 
to an extent and with a rigour then utterly un- 



* " Burning, indeed, and shin- 
ing, like the Baptist, in an evil 
time, he seemeth as if a beacon 
lighted on his small island to 
show what his Lord and Saviour 
could do in spite of man." — J. H. 
Newman. "When he preached 
before Queen Caroline in 1711, 
so greatly was she struck by his 
sweetness and dignity, that she 
offered him an English See, 



which he declined with the 
simple and noble words — so un- 
like the general spirit of his age 
— " that with the blessing of 
God he could do some small 
good in the little spot he then 
resided on, whereas, if he were 
removed into a larger sphere, he 
might be lost, and forget his 
duty to his flock and to his 
God." 



WILSON. 



117 



known. The annals of his episcopate — faithful, 
humble, saintly as it was — are yet inexpressibly 
dreary. They consist mainly of the miserable details 
of provincial vice among both clergy and people — a 
tissue of small crimes, disagreeably diversified by 
large ones — together with the warnings, penances, 
and excommunications which these entailed. People 
are censured, admonished, and have to give security 
even for offences so venial as not going to church, or 
for sleeping in church,* and there is a quite incessant 
doing of penance in white sheets. -f There was a 
bridle, of which a specimen is still preserved, to gag 
people guilty of abuse and slander ; and instead of 
being, as in England, whipped at the cart's tail, 
certain offenders were dragged through the water by 
soldiers at the stern of a boat. It is hardly to be 
wondered at that the energetic enforcement of a 
rapidly obsolescing system — even by a man so saintly 
and tender that he mingled his tears with those of 
the offenders whom he condemned — gradually aroused 
an organised opposition.^ I do not propose to detail 

* Also, for shaving during | table-cloth was used as the sheet 
church-time, for playing with a . of penance ! 
dog in church, for swimming a % See 'Life,' vol. i. pp.188, 442 ; 
duck and a spaniel on Sunday i vol. ii. pp. 526, 564, &c. There is 
evening, even for fiddling on a certain Archdeacon Horrobin, 
Saturday evening. — ' Life,' vol. i. with his miserable heresies; a 
p. 351 ; vol. ii. p. 642. number of feminine slanders, in 

t It shows the rude state of which a Madame Home, the wife 
things then prevalent, that on ' of Lord Derby's governor, is 
one occasion a ragged communion mixed up ; the defiant contumacy 



118 



CLASSIC PKEACHEES: 



all those wretched quarrels. One has scarcely 
patience to read the disgraceful illegalities, the 
grotesque state-documents, the churlishly insulting 
missives of the ill-bred and insignificant people who 
were Lord Derby's officials in the government of 
Man. For years of his life the Bishop " walked with 
his head in a cloud of poisonous flies ;" and at last, to 
the amazed and indignant grief of the whole island,, 
he, with two of his Vicars-General, was thrown into 
prison in Castle Bushen.* Nothing could have been 
more beautiful than his conduct under these trying 
circumstances. In a damp dark cell, punished like 
a felon, " with inexpressible hardship," his letters in- 
tercepted, his messengers " treated with all the dis- 
respect imaginable," he continued for nine weeks to 
pray for his enemies, and labour at the translation 
of the Manx Bible. At last he managed to lodge an 
appeal with the Privy Council, was released, and 
escorted back to his home amid the tumultuous joy 
of his people, with shouts and bonfires and scattered 
flowers. But he had after all to pay the heavy costs 
of his appeal, and, true to his earliest principles, 



of all connected with the Govern- 
ment, on the plea that as the 
Lord's retainers and family they 
are exempt from ecclesiastical 
authority ; refusal of the Govern- 
ment to lend soldiers to carry out 
the Bishop's sentences ; the pa- 
thetic story of the soldier Halsal, 



who was practically killed by the 
reckless insolence of Governor 
Horne ; — all of which things cul- 
minate in the explosion of hate 
and insults which found vent in 
the bishop's imprisonment. 

* June 29, 1722.—' Life,' vol. 
ii. p. 518. 



WILSON. 



119 



once more refused the English bishopric which, was 
offered him in indemnification. In these struggles 
with the petty pelting officers of the place — hun- 
dredth-rate men, dressed in a little brief authority 
— a lonely widower, a bereaved father, amid inces- 
sant annoyances and shameful calumnies, lie passed 
long years. Amid such a paltry environment of 
provincial malignities there is absolutely nothing 
beautiful but this good man's life, who, £i being con- 
vinced that he was no proprietor " (oh that all Eng- 
lish bishops of old had borne this in mind !), " but 
only a steward of the Church's patrimony, and find- 
ing by experience that God would be no man's 
debtor," was for years putting by forty per cent, of 
his income, for pious uses in his own diocese and 
among the poor.* 

3Iore peaceful days came at last, and a scene or 
two is illustrative both of the man and of the time. 
The Bishop was at Court, and when he had kissed 
the King's hand, — "Nobody," said the Queen to her 
ladies, " envies that honest man his bishopric." 
" Xor do I envy any one theirs," said he. " I be- 
lieve you," said Queen Caroline ; " you are a very 
honest man." 

"See here, my lords," said the Queen (on 
another occasion), when she had several prelates 
with her, "is a bishop who does not care for a 



* • Life,' vol. ii. p. 493. 



120 



CLASSIC PREACHEES : 



translation." " No, indeed, an 't please your Ma- 
jesty," said he, "I will not leave my wife in my 
old age because she is poor." Even the heart of 
George II. was won by such transparent goodness. 
"The Bishop came into the drawing-room in his 
usual simple dress, having a small black cap on the 
top of his head, with his hair flowing and silvery, and 
his shoes fastened, like those of an ancient Manxman, 
with leathern thongs instead of buckles. As soon as 
he entered the presence-chamber, the King stepped 
out of the circle of his courtiers, and advancing to- 
wards the Bishop, came to him, took him by the 
hand, and said, " My lord, I beg your prayers." 

His latter clays were spent almost exclusively in 
the duties of his diocese ; and it was in his own 
house at Bishopscourt that finally, in his ninety- 
third year, gentle sickness came upon him, and 
gradual decay. In his last days all was calm and 
beautiful. God gave him songs in the night. From 
that time to the hour of his death the very wan- 
derings of his delirium were praise and prayer. 
There was a beauty and dignity about his look and 
manner which impressed every beholder with awe ; 
and he died as he had lived, with holy words upon 
his lips. 

The works of Bishop Wilson were his 'Manx 
Catechism;' his 'History of the Isle of Man' in 
Bishop Gibson's edition of Camden ; his ' Instruction 
for the Indians;' his 'Introduction to the Lord's 



WILSON. 



121 



Supper;' his 'Maxims,' 6 Sacra Privata,' and 'Ser- 
mons.' It is by the last four books that he is mainly 
known, and the mere fact that they are still used, 
admired, and valued, is alone a sufficient proof that 
they appeal to deep feelings and supply real needs.* 
It is, however, as a Preacher that we have now to 
do with him, and it is his position as a Preacher that 
I wish mainly to define. And I must say at once that, 
in a literary point of view, his Sermons can hardly 
be held up as a remarkable model of style, of method, 
or even of theologie thought. Little more can be 
said of them than that his style is very plain, his 
method exceedingly simple, and his religious opin- 
ions unquestioningly orthodox. They contain so little 
that is specially rememberable, that the Bishop 
preached them again and again, over a space of 
fifty-eight years, with scarcely a word of alteration, 
and even " in the same words to the same audiences 
at no long spaces of time."t And if this shows " how 



* 'Manx Catechism,' 1699. 
'Plain Instructions for the Bet- 
ter Understanding of the Lord's 
Supper,' 1736. ' Instructions for 
the Indians,' 1740. ' Paroch.alia,' 
1788. ' Maxims of Piety and 
Christianity,' 1789. k Sacra Pri- 
vata,' 1800 ; and " now first 
printed entire from the original 
manuscripts," 1853. 'Works and 
Life,'ed. Crutwell, 1781. ' Works, 
and Life,' by Keble, in ' Library 
of Anglo - Catholic Theology,' 
7 vols., 1847-1852. ' History of 



the Isle of Man,' in Bishop Gib- 
son's ed. of ' Camden Britannica,' 
1722. 'The Holy Bible, with 
Notes,' &c, edited by Rev. C. 
Crutwell, 1785. 

f "He followed in this re- 
spect," says Mr. Keble, " as well 
as in the fact of their being 
written, the recommendation of 
Bishop Sanderson, who, in both 
these respects, set the pattern 
to the generation to which 
Wilson belonged.' — ' Life,' vol. i. 
p. 278. 



122 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



small scruple he had in repeating himself, and how 
little he cared to be original in teaching men their 
duty," it shows also that his Sermons owed very little 
to the emotions of the moment, and that he did not 
in the least desire to create those delicate and in- 
tense impressions which can be produced but once 
by the same utterance on the same minds. It is quite 
impossible to imagine such sermons as Jeremy Tay- 
lor's "House of Feasting," or South's "Fall of Man,"* 
preached twice over to the same audience. The 
glory of images once caught under the fresh sunlight 
of the imagination cannot be reproduced, and the 
language of fervour must be fresh from the soul, if it 
aims at kindling any answering glow. But there is 
really no reason why sermons such as those of Bishop 
Wilson — plain practical homilies in short simple 
paragraphs — should not be preached to the same 
audience almost any number of times. In his 
' Maxims ' and his ' Sacra Privata ' there is a certain 
tenderness and sweetness of cadence which almost 
constitutes a style, though they have none of the 
flowing rhythms of Bishop Andrewes, or the occa- 
sional beauties of Bishop Hall, or the poetic richness 
of Bishop Jeremy Taylor. They remind us more of 
the ' Imitatio Christi ' — though devoid of the subtle, 
indescribable charm, — the mystic splendour stealing 
over the oracular gems — which characterises thatim- 

* "Man as created in the image of God." — Sermons on Gen, i. 27 
(South, 1633-1716,. 



WILSON. 



123 



mortal little book. But Wilson's Sermons are un- 
doubtedly inferior to the ' Maxims ' and the ? Sacra 
Privata.' If we looked only at their negative cha- 
racteristics, we should not value them very highly. 
There is not in them all one burst of passion — one 
flight of eloquence ; not one striking metaphor; not 
one profoundly original thought ; not one illumina- 
tive aspect of duty ; not one deep touch of pathos ; 
not one phrase which quivers with the writer's own 
emotion ; not only " no thoughts that breathe or 
words that burn," but scarcely even one graceful 
allusion or happy illustration. His utterance is not 
the flight of the eagle, but the gliding of the swal- 
low, and through the smooth air of his exhortation 

" Eadit iter liquidum celeres neque promovet alas." * 

For instance, his home was cast for nearly sixty 
years in a spot of extreme beauty, where he daily 
heard the voices of the mountain and the sea, and 
saw the mists shroud the mountain-tops, and through 
rents of their white vail caught glimpses of sunset, 
and colourings of amazing loveliness. We can well 
imagine how many an exquisite and immortal image 
such surroundings would have flung on the reflective 
mirror of a poetic susceptibility ; but, so far as I have 

* When he was ordained, his ] learning, or fine language, and 
revered friend Mr. Hewetson j all deep and unuseful specula- 
had in a remarkable list of tions ard controversies," and 
directions advised hirn " to avoid i certainly Wilson very literally 
all juvenile affectation of wit, j fullowed the advice. 



124 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



observed, there is not in Wilson's Sermons, from be- 
ginning to end, one single allusion to the magnificence 
or loveliness of the outer world. Nor again, is there 
any reference worth speaking of to the great world 
of books. The Sermons of the seventeenth century- 
divines are rich with the spoils of their oceanic read- 
ing, and he who would edit their writings would 
need a library coextensive with the learning of that 
day : but the editor of Wilson needs little or nothing 
beyond a Bible and an Apocrypha. Nor, again, does 
he ever refer to that other inestimable revelation, the 
Book of History. Some of his mighty predecessors, 
using the experience of the past as a mirror to the 
present, had laid under contribution the annals of 
the world : but the reader of Wilson need hardly be 
aware that there has ever been any nation except the 
English and the Jews. And, once more, Wilson is 
singularly devoid of the faintest reflection on the 
circumstances of his day. It was the age of Hume, 
yet he does not contribute one iota of argument to 
the defence of Christianity : it was the age of Pope, 
yet he scarcely quotes or alludes to, one line of 
poetry :* it was the age of Addison and Johnson, 
yet he makes no reference to contemporary litera- 
ture : it was the age of Berkeley and Butler, yet 
for him metaphysics are non-existent : it was the age 



* In Sermon XXVII. lie quotes six lines from Samuel Woodford's 
4 Paraphrase of the Psalms.' 



WILSON. 



125 



of Hoadlt, yet he has nothing to contribute to 
the Bangorian controversy : it was the age of Law 
and Fexelox, yet he has not a word to say of mys- 
ticism or quietism : it was the age of the early 
preaching of Wesley and AYhitfield, yet he never 
touches upon that breath of reviving influence, which 
— alas ! too late it may be to avert the Xeniesis of her 
neglect and worldliness ! — was besinnino- to breathe 
over the dead Church like a stream of rire.* From 
his early manhood vast events had shaken the king- 
dom ; but though he had been twenty-two years old 
at the time of the Bloody Assizes, and had lived 
through such crises as the Great Revolution, the 
Massacre of Gleneoe, the victories of Marlborough, the 
Peace of Utrecht, the accession of the House of Brims- 
wick, and the adventures of Prince Charles Edward — 
though he had witnessed careers so varied, so melan- 
choly, so instructive as those of many of his illus- 
trious contemporaries in a stirring and troublous 
epoch — yet there is nothing in his writings to indi- 
cate the existence of Jesuits, or Jacobites, or Me- 
thodists, or Whigs, or Tories. 1 fear that an ordinary 
man in these days preaching the Sermons of Bishop 
Wilson, unaided by the saintliness and unction which 



* Wilson, 1663-1755 ; Hume, Wesley, 1703-1791 ; Whitfield, 

1711-1776; Pope, 1688-1744; 1714-1770. (Beigns of James II., 

Addison, 1672-1719 ; Johnson, 1685-16S9 ; William III. and 

1709-1784; Butler, 1695-1752; Mary, 16S9-1702 ; Anne, 1702- 

Hoadly, 1676-1711 ; Law, 16S6- 1714; George L, 1714-1727; 

1761 ; Fenelon, 1651-1715 ; George II.. 1727-1760.) 



126 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



gave to those Sermons all their power, might be 
voted an unoriginal retailer of familiar truths.* 

How is it, then, that Bishop Wilson was un- 
doubtedly a great preacher ; that so good and fasti - 
tidious a judge as -Queen Caroline called him her 
silver-tongued Bishop ; that he was much followed 
and admired ; that the various London Societies were 
always anxious to secure his advocacy ; that he has 
even been called " the most perfect Gospel preacher 
among uninspired men " ? Why is it that, even in 
great English towns, crowds would flock round him, 
with the request, " Bless me too, my Lord " ; and that 
when " these divine discourses," as one of his clergy 
calls them, were preached in Manx after his death, 
crowds began to flock again to the churches which 
Methodism was beginning to empty ? 

I answer first that, though his Sermons were 
not great in the way of literary greatness ; though 
they partake of, and illustrate, that downward move- 
ment, which, from the splendour of Barrow and 
Taylor, plunged like a flake of falling fire through 
the chill transparency of Clarke and Tillotson, into 



* " It is ray full conviction 
that in any half-dozen sermons 
of Donne or Taylor there are 
more thoughts, more facts and 
images, more excitement to in- 
quiry and intellectual effort, than 
are presented to the congrega- 
tions of the present day in as 
many churches or meetings dur- 



ing twice as many months." — 
Coleridge's 4 Lay Sermons,' p. 
227. But it should be added in 
fairness that the clergy of to-day 
have, as a rule, to produce as 
many sermons — or compositions 
which bear that name — in a 
year as the 17th century divines 
had to do in all their lives. 



WILSON. 



127 



the orthodox dulness of Beveridge, and which, when 
all but extinguished, sputtered feebly amid white 
ashes in the tawdry verbosity of Harvey and the arti- 
ficial rhetoric of Blair ;* yet they were superior to 
the ordinary, and beyond all comparison superior 
to some of the more pretentious, sermons of the 
age in which he lived.f 

1. For in the first place they were absolutely 
sincere. The age in which they were preached was 
a godless age ; it was " an age, whose poetry was 
without romance, whose philosophy was without in- 
sight, and whose public men were without character." 
It abounded in " immoral thoughtlessness." A " loose 
and ignorant Deism " was freely prattled in all 
fashionable circles, and general scorn of religion was, 
as always, attended by general profligacy of man- 
ners.} The clergy themselves were remiss in their 



* Tillotson, 1630-1694; Be- 
veridge, 1636-1707 ; Clarke, 
1675-1729 ; Harvey, 1714-1758; 
Blair, 1718-1799. 

t Milton speaks of the ordi- 
nary sermons of his day with 
unspeakable scorn, as " treading 
the constant round of common 
doctrinal heads," and the book- 
draft " out of which, as out of an 
alphabet or sol-fa," a parochial 
minister, who bad reached Lis 
Herculean pillars of a warm bene- 
fice, would be unspeakabiy fur- 
nished to the performance of more 
than a weekly charge of ser- 



moning — " not to reckon up the 
infinite helps of iuterlinearies, 
breviaries, synopses, and other 
loitering gear." — ' Areopagitica.' 

X See, among hundreds of 
other authorities, Butler's ' Ana- 
logy,' and ' Charges,' passim ; the 
Preface to Cave's ' Primitive 
Christianity ; ' Dr. Stanhope's 
' Sermon before the House of 
Lords;' many of Wilson's own 
Sermons ; Wesley's ' Further 
Appeal ; ' Hartley's ' Observa- 
tions on Man,' vol. ii. p. 441. 
| " In this estimate," says Mr. 
Mark Pattison, " the followers 



128 



CLASSIC PREACH EES I 



labours, and self-indulgent in their lives. There 
were some even among leading statesmen who were 
drunken, illiterate, and coarse. There were mem- 
bers of the Royal Family who set a scandalous 
example. The odions letters of Chesterfield show 
with what unblushing cynicism a father could teach 
immorality to his son as a necessary element of a 
fashionable career. The uneducated and shamefully 
neglected masses sank into terrible depths of crime 
and brutality. The pictures of Hogarth, the novels 
of Smollett and Fielding, show that English morals 
had fallen to their very nadir of degradation. And 
how did God's ministers attempt to stem this torrent 
of iniquity? what was the teaching they offered, 
what the motives they opposed to all this crime and 
denial of God ? Nothing, for the most part, but the 
coldest and nakedest morality. They were not Pro- 
phets ; they were not Seers ; they were not even well- 
instructed Scribes ; they were but cold Essayists and 
dull Utilitarians. Their Gospel w r as a Gospel of bald 
respectability. There was no passionate appeal to 
the wavering, no fiery denunciation of the insolent 
wrong-doer. Cringing flattery, unblushing inconsis- 
tency, open worldliness, greedy hunting of prefer- 
ments, — Bishops and Archbishops amassing colossal 
fortunes, and leaving their trail across their pro- 



of Mill and Carlyle agree with 
those of Dr. Newman." 1 Essays 
and Keviews,' pp. 255, 322 ; 



Mahon's ' History of England,' 
chap, xi., &c. &c. 



WILSON". 



129 



vinces by the shameless nepotism, which gorged with 
pluralities of every desirable benefice their sons and 
kinsmen, — a clergy addicted to such aims as these* — 
a clergy painfully anxious to relieve themselves of 
the crying sin of enthusiasm,! — a clergy which revel- 
led in such pompous euphuisms and polished nullities 
as those of Blair, could never deeply stir the heart of 
the age. For a living coal from the altar they offered 
to their generation a flittering: icicle from the study. 
They applied feeble sprinklings of tepid water to 
an age which needed burning deluges of baptismal 
fire. The very conception of a sermon became to 
the last degree artificial and inane. " I should think 
a clergyman might distinguish himself," said the poet 
Shenstone, (i by composing a set of sermons on the 
ordinary virtues extolled by the classic writers, in- 
troducing the ornamental flourishes of Horace," &c. ! 
Even Bishops, in their charges, referred their clergy 
to the satires of Juvenal,i instead of bidding them 
catch their moral intensity from Isaiah or St. James. 

* For the tone and character prove by irrefragable evidence 
of the clergy after the Eestora- the aphorism of ancient wisdom 
tion and onwards see Burnet's that nothing great was ever 
' History of his own Times,' j achieved without enthusiasm, 
vol. i. pp. 186. 258 ; * Diary,' Feb. ; For what is enthusiasm but the 
16, 1668 .; Macaulay's ' History,' , oblivion and swallowing up of 
chap. iii. ; Stought m's ' Church ' self in an object dearer than 
of the Restoration,' vol. i. p. 511 ; I self, or in an idea more vivid ?" 
and nearly all allusions to them j — Coleridge's ' Lay Sermons,' 
in the contemporary literature, j p. 25. 

t " Histories incomparably j % Bishop Burnet's 1 Pastoral 
more authentic than Mr. Hume's j Letters.' 

[st. james's.] K 



130 



CLASSIC PKEACHEES: 



The conception of religion had dwindled into a cal- 
culating selfishness, and a prudential commonplace. 
The current theology is typified by a sermon which 
explained the Fatherhood of God as an elegant met- 
aphor.* The chief anxiety of the preachers seemed 
to be that none should suppose them to be so utterly 
foolish as to urge any one to be righteous overmuch. 
Enthusiasm ? it needed men who were " boiling in 
spirit "f to continue the work of the Prophets and 
the Apostles ; it needed a voice of thunder, and a 
tongue of fire, to shame into decency, and startle into 
repentance this corrupt and guilty age. 

2. And though Wilson's was no voice of fire, yet his 
preaching was far above the average teaching of his 
age. He has this surpassing merit, that " he never 
penned one sentence which savoured of unreality." 
Among his contemporaries he shone like a light in 
the world. His style is exquisitely lucid, and has 
a certain dignity and sweetness of its own. If his 
sermons have no special force, they have at least an 
admirable directness ; and if they have no eloquence, 
yet they are not devoid of tenderness and unction. 
They assume all Christian doctrine ; they ignore all 
speculative theology ; but they have these three 
marked characteristics: — a very practical aim; an 



* See Clarke's Sermon on 
" Call no man your Father on 
Earth ;" and see some excellent 
remarks in Mr. Leslie Stephen's 



' English Thought in the Eigh- 
teenth Century.' 

f ZeovTes iv TrvzvfxaTi (Kom. 
xii. 11). 



WILSON. 



131 



intimate knowledge of Scripture ; and the peaceful 
calm of a most untroubled faith. They do not indeed 
glow with an inspiring passion, but they do shine 
with a serene and heavenly light. And if they never 
soar, — if they have no exordium, no peroration, no 
one prevailing all-absorbing motive, — if they never 
rise to a climax, or startle by a paradox, or arouse 
by an antithesis — yet, on the other hand, they never 
sink. They have in them no word of folly, no tinge 
of affectation, no shadow of bad taste. They need, 
it has been acutely said, to be tested by immediate 
translation into action. " To think on Bishop Wilson 
with veneration," said Dr. Johnson, " is only to agree 
with the whole Christian world. I hope to look into 
his books with other purposes than those of criticism, 
and after their perusal not only to write but to love 
better." Accept them as an authoritative guide to 
religious conduct, drawn from deep and lifelong ex- 
perience, and then, ceasing to be ordinary, they be- 
come sublime. * And this is why one of the acutest 
and most genial of modern critics ventures to rank 
Bishop Wilson among the four chief names of the 
English Church. " Hooker," he says, " is great, by 
having signally and above others the sense in reli- 
gion of history and historic development. Butler is 
great, by having the sense of philosophy ; Barrow, by 
having that of morals ; Wilson, that of practical 



* "Debemus legere simpliccs et devotos libros, sicut altos et 
profundos." — ' Imit. Christi,' i. 5. 

K 2 



1S2 



CLASSIC PKEACHERS : 



Christianity." * We may sum up in one word the 
excellence of Wilson by saying that, to a pre- 
eminent degree, he received the kingdom of God 
as a little child. 

3. But another source of his power— if, indeed, it 
be not the same under another aspect— lay in the 
r)6o? of the man, — in the deep moral impression 
which he made on his hearers. t " His style," said 
Mr. Moore, in his Funeral Sermon, " is adapted to 
the capacity of all degrees of men : at the same time 
he delivered his sentiments with all the dignity and 
authority of an inspired Apostle." Even when the 
sermon was poorest, the speaker was a Saint of God. 
The lips of such a man, even if he be — as Wilson 
was not — of stammering tongue, will speak wisdom. 
There were many good men in Wilson's, as in every 
age, whose lives have been all the more unnoticed 
because they were hid with Christ in God ; but a 
Saint is one who makes his religion, absolutely and 



* Matthew Arnold's ' Lit. and 
Dogma, 5 p. xx. Elsewhere he 
attributes to him a balance of 
the four qualities of ardour, unc- 
tion, downright honesty, and 
plain good sense, which might 
have resulted in a prosaic reli- 
gion held fanatically, but which 
he possessed in a fulness and 
perfection which made this un- 
toward result impossible — "his 
unction is so perfect, and in such 
happy alliance with his good 
sense, that it becomes tenderness 



and fervent charity ; his good 
sense is so perfect and in such 
happy alliance with his unc- 
tion that it becomes moderation 
and insight." — ' Culture and An- 
archy,' p. vii. 

f " Sermons, though never so 
good, are not always understood 
or minded by common people ; 
but a good, a sober, a pious life 
and example, is a language that 
everybody understands." — Wil- 
son's ' Sermons,' lxxxix. 



WILSON. 



133 



inflexibly, and in ways little familiar to his genera- 
tion, the rule of his whole life ; and who, with a per- 
fect absence of all self-consciousness, does this in such 
a manner as to seize the imagination and influence 
the character of his own and of other generations. 
Berkeley and Butler were men of pre-eminent good- 
ness, and men of a thousand times the ability of 
Ken and Wilson ; yet we do think of Ken and 
Wilson, and we do not think of Berkeley and 
Butler, as saints of God. Living in an age in which 
sensuality had eaten like a cancer into the heart 
of society, Wilson left on all men the impression of 
serene and stainless purity. Living in an age of 
greed and worldliness, he chose the lot of self-deny- 
ing poverty and voluntary retirement. And so be- 
hind the Sermons stood the man. We who only read 
those Sermons cannot fairly judge of them. Men 
can listen to much which they would find it tedious 
to peruse in print ; and he, for instance, who can only 
judge of Whitfield by his published remains, can 
form no conception of the thrilling effect produced 
by his impassioned oratory. 

" See God's ambassador in pulpit stand 
Where they could take note from his look and hand, 
And from his speaking action bear away 
More sermon than our preachers use to say." 

And when we find in Wilson's Sermons the simplest 
truths of faith and morality set forth with entire 
sincerity, in language plain, but reverent, and void 
of every tinge of Pharisaism; when we know that 



134 



CLASSIC PEEACHERS. 



his life and his words were in perfect accord ; when 

we recall in imagination the forehead whereon the 

Lamb had set his seal ; the calm dignity of bearing — 

the flowing silver hair — the comely and benevolent 

aspect — the sweet and reverent voice — the saintly 

and venerable figure — we can well imagine that 

none could listen to exhortations such as his — so 

faithful, so intelligible, so practical, so scriptural — 

without beins: the better and wiser for them. 

" At church with meek and unaffected grace 
His looks adorned the venerable place ; 
Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, 
And fools who came to scoff remained to pray." 

And, if many of our great divines have risen to 
loftier heights of ability; have left behind them 
more immortal utterances ; have swayed more 
potently the hearts of multitudes ; have shed more 
light upon the great problems of religion ; have 
fired with a more ardent enthusiasm the love of 
virtue ; — yet the life and example of Wilson are a 
heritage more precious than eloquent words. And so 
long as the spirit of religion has any influence upon 
mankind (and that surely will be so long as man is 
man), so long will his calm good sense, his practical 
wisdom, his perfect consistency, his sober-minded 
gentleness — in one word, the holiness of his charac- 
ter, as preserved for us by a warm and loving me- 
morial, — furnish us with a worthy object of love and 
imitation in this true servant of the Lord Jesus — 
Thomas Wilson, the Saintly Preacher. 



BUTLER, 

THE ETHICAL PREACHER. 



Sermons by the Right Reverend Father in God, Joseph Butler, 
D.C.L , late Lord Bishop of Durham. A New Edition. Oxford : 
At the Clarendon Press, mdcccxxvi. 



Professor Mozley, Bishop Butler's modern representative — "Was 
Butler a preacher? — The essentials of preaching — How both 
Paley (in his ' Natural Theology ') and Butler are preachers — 
Deficiency of evangelical reference in Butler's Sermons, and the 
reason of it — No argument against his personal faith in Christ — 
His Sermons not only evidential, but also indicative of the line of 
human duty — His style needs to be popularised — His Sermons 
may be regarded as masterly expositions of certain great truths 
of Holy Scripture — (1) They show that human nature was made 
originally in God's image — The consistency of benevolence with 
reasonable selfdove in the Divine Mind — All the moral attributes 
of God resolvable into love — Exhibition of benevolence and self- 
love in the Passion of Our Lord — Christ exemplifies the indigna- 
tion against moral evil, which Butler intimates to be part of a 
perfect character — (2) Butler illustrates the text that man is 
*' fearfully and wonderfully made " — The appetites and affections 
— Vicious affections only excesses and morbid developements of 
innocent ones — Self-love and benevolence — The conscience re. 
garded by Butler rather as an eye than a light — How Butler's 
theory of human nature may assist us in self-examination and 
self-discipline — and show the mistake of a morbid pietism — and 
give the sound and healthy view of resentment — (3) Butler's 



136 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



view of the corruption of human nature — The deceitfulness of the 
heart analysed and exhibited in the Sermons on the Character of 
Balaam, and on Self-deceit — Revelation adds to the description 
of the effects of the Fall, which may be gathered from reason, this 
further particular, that man's faith was disabled by it — Combina- 
tion in man of gratification of present passion with faith in a 
foreseen^future would have been a topic worthy of Butler — Identity 
of what is called Faith in the language of Revelation with what 
Butler would call Reason — Gen. iii. furnishes the explanation of 
the moral convulsion of which Butler finds such evident traces in 
our nature. 

A volume of Sermons, published in the course of 
last year, — probably, in knowledge of the human 
heart and analysis of human motives, one of the 
two greatest contributions to religious literature 
which the nineteenth century has made,* — recalls to 
us the ethical discourse which has too much gone 
out of late, and of which Butler's Sermons are the 
great model and archetype. Joseph Butler, Bishop 
and Prince Palatine of Durham, is not dead ; or 
rather, " he being dead, yet speaketh " in the pages 
of Professor Mozley. The Professor's great dis- 
courses on " The peaceful temper" and on " Our duty 
towards equals," and his method of showing how war 
is bound up in that distinction of the human race 
into nations, which is part of the present system of 
things, are conceived in Butler's happiest vein, and 
differ from his Sermons chiefly in being much easier 
reading, and couched in a style far less ponderous. 



* The other being the Sermons 
of the Rev. John Henry Newman, 
late Vicar of St. Mary-the- Vir- 



gin's, Oxford. Qui cum talis sit 
utinam noster adhuc esset. 



BUTLER. 



137 



But ethical Sermons generally give rise in some 
minds to a question, the answer to which will throw 
light upon the, true character of preaching, and 
may be given, we think, quite suitably from the 
pulpit, without any blinking of the sacred objects 
which should be paramount there. That Bishop 
Butler was a profound religious thinker, and a great 
moral philosopher, will be admitted on all hands. 
But there are many who would demur to his claim 
to rank among great preachers. No doubt he 
wrote discourses, which he entitled Sermon?, and 
which were delivered from the pulpit. These, 
however, are but the accidents and accessories of 
preaching ; and before any person's claims to be a 
preacher can be satisfactorily made out, it must 
be shown that his discourses are essentially sermons, 
sermons in something more than the name. In 
attempting to do this for Bishop Butler, we shall 
gain an insight into the distinguishing character of 
his preaching. 

Every one understands what is meant when a 
sermon and an expository lecture are spoken of as 
distinct. But it is doubtful whether the terms em- 
ployed represent the real and essential distinction 
between the things.* All preaching is, or ought to 



* Probably the more correct 
definition would be to call the 
sermon an exposition of a single 
detached passage of Holy Scrip- 



ture, the lecture an exposition 
of an entire context with all 
the sequences of thought -which 
link text to text. In the first 



138 



CLASSIC PEEACHERS*. 



be, expository ; that is, it ought to be an exposition 
or setting forth of some part of the Word of God. 
If any discourse is not this, it is not preaching. x\nd, 
conversely, if any part of the Word of God, whether 
promise or precept, warning or consolation, forms the 
subject of a discourse, it is properly called a sermon, 
and the person delivering it is a preacher. But in this 
definition the expression, " the word of God," must 
be understood in its full legitimate breadth of mean- 
ing. There is a word of God, for those who have 
ears to hear it, in Nature as well as in Revelation, — 
a word not by any means so explicit as Holy Scrip- 
ture, but yet which serves sufficiently, as St. Paul 
tells us, to render those " without excuse " * who do 
not heed it ; the word of which the Psalmist speaks, 
when he says,f " The heavens declare the glory of 
God ; and the firmament sheweth his handy work. 
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night 
sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor lan- 
guage, where their voice is not heard." Now these 
works of God, whereby His "eternal power and 
godhead are understood among men, are not 
merely — and one may say not chiefly — outside us. 
The noblest work of God is man himself. Man's 



there is more or less unity of 
thought ; in the second there is 
no other unity than that which 
is given by tracing the stages 
of the argument, if the passage 
is argumentative, or the develop- 



ment of the narrative, if it be 
historical. 

* See Rom. i. 20. 

f Psalm xix. 1, 2, 3. 

X See Rom. i. 20. 



BUTLER. 



139 



mental and moral anatomy, and its adaptation 
to his circumstances and surroundings, bears a 
stronger testimony to the Creator's power, wisdom, 
and goodness, than even the architecture of the 
heavens or the structure of animals. The ex- 
pounders, therefore, of the works of God, seeing 
that His works are a true revelation of Himself, 
though dimmer and less explicit than His word, 
may rightfully, if only they point upwards continu- 
ally from the creature to the Creator, claim the 
title of great preachers. Paley, in his 'Natural 
Theology,' is a great preacher, his object being to 
discover and disclose the traces of an intelligent and 
benevolent Creator, which are scattered so thick over 
the whole realm of nature. And not less surely — 
rather much more — is Butler a magnificent preacher, 
whose Sermons discuss and expound that great sub- 
ject, which the Apostle lays down * as the foundation- 
stone of his argument on the justifying efficacy of 
faith, the law " written in the heart," and the " wit- 
ness " of conscience. Hence comes the deficiency 
of evangelical reference, or rather of reference to 
revealed religion, in these Sermons, a fact which 
is patent upon the surface of them,f and which to 



* See Eom. ii. 15. i of Injuries "), where the moral 

f A remarkable instance of ground of capital punishment is 

this absence of reference to Holy thus stated : " "What justifies 

Scripture is to be found in public executions is, not that the 

Sermon IX. (" Upon Forgiveness guilt or demerit of the criminal 



140 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



superficial readers, possessed with the conventional 
notion of what a sermon is or ought to be, forms 
no inconsiderable stumbling-block. Even where one 
would most naturally look for them, evangelical allu- 
sions are, if I may so say,, studiously avoided. Thus 
the two great Sermons " Upon the Love of God," that 
is, on our love towards Him, do not even incident- 
ally and in passing refer to that love of God to- 
wards us, which is the great inducing motive of 
our love to Him, according to that word of the 
Evangelist,* " We love him, because he first 
loved us." While recognising the goodness of God 
generally as that which "ought and has a natural 
tendency to beget in us the affection of gratitude," f 
he is silent as to that great exhibition of Divine 



dispenses with the obligation of 
good-will, neither would this 
justify any severity ; but that his 
life is inconsistent with the quiet 
and happiness of the world : that 
is, a general and more enlarged 
obligation necessarily destroys a 
particular and more confined one 
of the same kind, inconsistent 
with it " (p. 145). As far as any 
mischief goes, which the culprit 
himself might hereafter do, the 
world would be sufficiently 
secured against it by his per- 
petual imprisonment. Hence 
what Butler must have meant is 
that, unless the extreme penalty 
were exacted from the criminal, 
there would be no sufficient de- 



terrent against crimes of the 
same order. But what we wish 
to draw attention to is the entire 
omission of any reference to the 
Divine authorization of capital 
punishment as inflicted by the 
magistrate, both in the Noachic 
precept (Gen. ix. 6), and in the 
New Testament, where the capi- 
tal punishment is not restricted 
to the offence of blood-shedding 
(Eom. xiii. 4). " The sword " 
placed in the hand of the civil 
magistrate was a symbol of his 
being invested with the power 
of life and death. 

* 1 John iv. 19. 

t Serm. XIII. p. 241. 



BUTLER. 



141 



goodness, the gift of God's Son for and to sinners, the 
comfortable pledge to us, as the xlpostle teaches,* of 
His readiness to bestow all lower and lesser gifts. It 
is almost as if, in saying the General Thanksgiving, 
a man should stop short after the words, " We bless 
Thee for our creation, preservation, and all the bless- 
ings of this life," and should drop all the subsequent 
mention of the " inestimable love " manifested in re- 
demption, of the " means of grace," and of " the hope 
of glory." 

The omission is far too strongly marked to be 
attributed to aught else but deliberate design. 
Butler intended his treatment of the love of God to 
be, like the rest of his Sermons, purely and exclu- 
sively moral. " Then why," it might be asked, 
" take up such a subject at all ? Why not let the 
Sermons ' Upon Human Nature,' ' The Government 
of the Tongue,' and other purely moral subjects, 
stand alone, without intruding into the domain of 
Theology by a disquisition upon the love of God ? " 
The answer is, that it is assumed throughout the 
Sermons that the being and attributes of God are 
recognisable by the light of reason and conscience,! 



* See Kom. viii. 32. 

t See Serm. L p. 11, where lie 
mentions certain " instances of 
our Maker's care and love both 
of the individual and the spe- 
cies ; " Serm. II. p. 26, " Instincts 
by which they " [brutes] " are 
carried on to the end the Author 



of their nature intended them 
for ; " Serm. III. p. 42, " It is 
evident that, exclusive of revela- 
tion, man cannot be considered 
as a creature left by his Maker 
to act at random ; " Serm. IV. 
p. 58, " The good Author of our 
nature designed us not only 



142 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



quite apart from the more brilliant light which 
revealed religion sheds upon them. Butler will 
not avail himself, in the smallest degree, of that 
more brilliant light. His design is to show that the 
morality of the Gospel, which turns upon the two 
principal pivots of the love of God and the love of 
our neighbour, is indicated in the structure of human 
nature, when it is closely analysed. If the heart of 
man, truly read and interpreted, is found to make a 
most distinct and intelligent echo to the twofold 
precept of the love of God and of our neighbour, 
that furnishes a very strong presumption that this 
summary of morality is from the Author of our 



necessaries, but also enjoyment 
and satisfaction;" Serm. XIV. 
p. 243, "Our reason convinces 
us that God is present with us, 
and we see and feel the effects 
of his goodness ; " ibid. p. 252, 
" Since the supreme Mind, the 
Author and Cause of all things, 
is the highest possible object to 
himself, he may be an adequate 
supply to all the faculties of our 
s^uls ; " — and the Sermons " upon 
the Love of God " passim. 

It will be remembered that the 
great religious controversy of 
Butler's days was with the 
Deists (Collins, Toland, Tinclal, 
Chubb, &c.) who admitted the 
being and attributes of God. 
Mr. Leslie Stephen, in his ' His- 
tory of English Thought in the 
Eighteenth Century' [London, 



1876], seems to think the lucu- 
brations of the Deists one of the 
most important factors in the 
serious thought of that age. An 
able paper in the ' Quarterly 
Eeview ' for April 1877, calls in 
question the importance of the 
Deistical speculations then so 
rife; but of course these specu- 
lations must have been constantly 
present to the theologians of the 
day ; and when they wrote con- 
troversially or apologetically, 
they would feel that by the 
greater part of the religious 
thinkers of the day no objection 
would be made to their assuming 
as true the first paragraph of 
the Apostles' Creed, however 
prevalent might be the scepti- 
cism respecting the second and 
third. 



BUTLEK. 



143 



nature. It is an independent testimony to Gospel 
morality which Butler is seeking to elicit from his 
researches into the human heart ; and in order to do 
this, he is bound to refrain from advancing any truth 
of revealed religion, which natural religion does 
not of itself establish. Thus his argument de- 
manded the banishment of evangelical topics. But 
let us not do this great and good divine the crying 
injustice of supposing that such topics did not sit 
very near his heart. The prelate w 7 ho, in compli- 
ance with his own principle of the benefit accruing 
from public expressions of faith,* set up in that cold 
and rationalizing age the emblem of our redemp- 
tion in the chapel of his palace at Bristol, and was 
defamed and vilified as a Papist | in consequence, 
as many smaller men than he have been since his 
day on no better or more reasonable ground, can 
never have been wanting in appreciation of that re- 
demption, which was wrought upon the cross, and 
of which the cross is the symbol. 



* " Your chief business, there- 
fore, is to endeavour to beget a 
practical sense of it" [religion] 
"upon their hearts .... And 
this is to be done by keeping up, 
as we are able, the form and face 
of religion with decency and re- 
verence, and in such a degree as 
to bring the thoughts of religion 
often to their minds. . . . Ex- 
ternal acts of piety and devotion, 



and the frequent returns of them, 
are necessary, to keep up a sense 
of religion, which the affairs of 
the world will otherwise wear 
out of men's hearts." (Charge 
to the Clergy of the Diocese of 
Durham, in the year mdccll, 
pp. 434, 430.) 

f See the Biographical Sketch 
appended to this Lecture. 



144 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



Following in the line of thought which has been 
thus opened, we will first speak of these Sermons 
in their more obvious character as evidential, and 
then regard them as expositions of certain great 
and fundamental truths of Holy Scripture. 

I. And in speaking of them as evidential, our 
first observation is that they are something more 
than evidential, that the same argument which 
serves the purpose of confuting selfish and sceptical 
theories, is made to serve equally well the moral 
purpose of enforcing duty upon the professed be- 
liever. A little above a parallel was drawn between 
Paley and Butler, as being both of them expositors 
of that lower revelation which God has made of 
Himself in the works of nature — Paley dealing with 
the works which lie around and outside of man, 
Butler with man himself, the noblest of the works. 
But if Paley may, in regard of his ' Natural Theo- 
logy/ be justly regarded as a great preacher, how 
much stronger a claim has Butler to the title ! 
The various instances of design and adaptation 
which Paley alleges in his work, and which in- 
stances might be augmented to almost any ex- 
tent, the design in the eye* of the cat, in the 



* " The eyes of animals which 
follow their prey by night, as 
cats, owls, &c, possess a faculty 
not given to those of other spe- 
cies, namely, of closing the pupil 



entirely. The final cause of which 
seems to be this. It was neces- 
sary for such animals to be able 
to descry objects with very small 
degrees of light. This capacity 



BUTLER. 



145 



tongue* of the woodpecker, in the footf of the water- 



depended upon the superior sen- 
sibility of the retina ; that is, 
upon its being affected by the 
most feeble impulses. But that 
tenderness of structure which 
rendered the membrane thus ex- 
quisitely sensible, rendered it 
also liable to be offended by the 
access of stronger degrees of 
light. The contractile range 
therefore of the pupil is in- 
creased in these animals, so as 
to enable them to close the aper- 
ture entirely, which includes the 
power of diminishing it in every 
degree; whereby at all times 
such portions, and only such por- 
tions, of light are admitted as 
may be received without injury 
to the sense." (Paley's ' Natu- 
ral Theology;' London, 1802; 
chap. xii. p. 257.) 

* " The tongue of the wood- 
pecker is one of those singulari- 
ties which nature presents us 
with, when a singular purpose 
is to be answered. It is a parti- 
cular instrument for a particular 
use ; and what else but design 
ever produces such ? The wood- 
pecker lives chiefly upon insects, 
lodged in the bodies of decayed 
or decaying trees. For the pur- 
pose of boring into the wood, it 
is furnished with a bill, straight, 
hard, angular, and sharp. When, 
by means of this piercer, it has 
reached the cells of the insects, 
then comes the office of its 
[st. james's.] 



tongue ; which tongue is, first, of 
such a length that the bird can 
dart it out three or four inches 
from the bill, in this respect 
differing greatly from every other 
| species of bird; in the second 
place, it is tipped with a stiff, 
sharp, bony thorn ; and, in the 
third place, which appears to me 
the most remarkable property of 
all, this tip is dentated on both 
sides, like the beard of an arrow 
or the barb of a hook. The 
description of the part declares 
its use. The bird, having ex- 
posed the retreats of the insects 
j by the assistance of its bill, with 
I a motion inconceivably quick 
I launches out at them with this 
long tongue ; transfixes them 
upun the barbed needle at the 
end of it ; and thus draws its 
prey within its mouth. If this be 
not mechanism, what is? Should 
it be said, that, by continual 
endeavours to shoot out the 
tongue to the stretch, the wood- 
I pecker species may by degrees 
| have lengthened the organ itself, 
beyond that of other birds, what 
I account can be given of its form, 
of its tip ? How, in particular, 
did it get its barbs, its dentation ? 
These barbs, in my opinion, 
wherever they occur, are deci- 
sive proofs of mechanical con- 
trivance." (' Natural Theology,' 
chap. xiii. 268-270.) 

t " If it were our intention to 
L 



146 



CLASSTC PREACHERS : 



fowl, in the lamp* of the glow-worm, of what are 
they evidences? Clearly of the intelligence and 
beneficence of the great Creator, and nothing more. 



pursue the consideration further, 
I should take in that generic 
distinction among birds, the web- 
foot of water-fowl. It is an in- 
stance which may be pointed 
out to a child. The utility of 
the web to water-fowl, the inu- 
tility to land-fowl, are so obvious, 
that it seems impossible to notice 
the difference without acknow- 
ledging the design. I am at a 
loss to know how those who deny 
the agency of an intelligent 
Creator dispose of this example. 
There is nothing in the action 
of swimming, as carried on by a 
bird upon the surface of the 
water, that should generate a 
membrane between the toes. As 
to that membrane, it is an exer- 
cise of constant resistance. The 
only supposition I can think of 
is, that all birds have been origi- 
nally water-fowl and web-footed ; 
that sparrows, hawks, linnets, 
&c, which frequent the land, 
have, in process of time, and in 
the course of many generations, 
had this part worn away by 
treading upon hard ground. To 
such evasive assumptions must 
atheism always have recourse; 
and, after all, it confesses that 
the structure of the feet of birds, 
in their original form, was criti- 
cally adapted to their original 



destination." ('Natural Theo- 
logy,' chap. xii. pD. 255, 256.) 

* " If the reader, looking to 
our distributions of science, wish 
to contemplate the chemistry, as 
well as the mechanism of nature, 
the insect creation will afford 
him an example. I refer to the 
light in the tail of a glow-worm. 
Two points seem to be agreed 
upon by naturalists concerning 
it : first, that it is phosphoric ; 
secondly, that its use is to attract 
the male insect. The only thing 
to be inquired after is the singu- 
larity, if any such there be, in 
the natural history of this animal, 
which should render a provision 
of this kind more necessary for 
it than for other insects. That 
singularity seems to be the dif- 
ference which subsists between 
the male and the female, which 
difference is greater than what 
we find in any other species of 
I animal whatever. The glow- 
i worm is a female caterpillar, the 
I male of which is a fly, lively, 
comparatively small, dissimilar 
to the female in appearance, pro- 
bably also as distinguished from 
her in habits, pursuits, and man- 
I ners, as he is unlike in form 
and external constitution. Here, 
then, is the adversity of the case. 
The caterpillar cannot meet her 



BUTLEE. 



14? 



Paley's argument stands clear altogether of human 
duty, yields no indications of what man's character 
and conduct should be, unless, indeed, it be the 
inference that to a Being so wise, so powerful, so 
good, man owes adoration, praise, and gratitude. 
But not so Butler's argument on the internal eco- 
nomy of the human heart. When he vindicates a 
place among the principles of our nature for bene- 



companion in the air. The 
winged rover disdains the ground. 
They might never, therefore, be 
brought together, did not this 
radiant torch direct the volatile 
mate to his sedentary female." 
('Works of W. Paley, D.D.' 
London : 1821. Vol. iv. p. 263.) 

Of course in thus citing Paley, 
whose works (like those of But- 
ler himself) it is now the fashion 
ungenerously to depreciate, I am 
not iguorant that it will be ob- 
jected that the argument from 
final causes has had its day, and 
is going out, and that to appeal 
to it, when it is on the wane, is 
just to ignore the discoveries 
made (or alleged to be made ) by 
modern savants. But my firm 
persuasion is that no attempt 
(however subtle and ingenious) 
permanently to supplant the 
argument from design will suc- 
ceed in the long run, or take 
hold of the public mind. It is 
rooted in the common-sense of 
mankind; and though a few 
philosophers (or would-be philo- 



sophers) will from time to time 
find an agreeable diversion in 
criticising and picking holes in 
it, it will crop up again after 
they have left the scene, and by 
its vitality defy its assailants. 
W"e may safely challenge any 
one to succeed in persuading the 
great majority of men that where 
there is a complete and curious 
adaptation of any natural object 
to a certain end, it is not due to 
an intelligent design in a con- 
structive Mind, but only to the 
operation of a natural instinct in 
the object itself. Let savants 
say what they please to throw 
doubt upon this ; their specula- 
tions will all go for nothing in the 
long run. Or rather, perhaps, 
men will make upon them the 
reflection which Butler makes 
upon the subject of certain fan- 
tastic moral theories : " Persons 
of superior capacity and improve- 
ment have often fallen into 
errors, which no one of mere 
common understanding could." 
(Serm. V. p. 84.) 

L 2 



148 



CLASSIC PREACHEES! 



volence or good-will towards our neighbour — a prin- 
ciple which rests in our neighbour's happiness as its 
end — and shows that because this "benevolence, 
though natural in man to man, yet is in a very low 
degree, kept down by interest and competitions ; and 
men, for the most part, are so engaged in the busi- 
ness and pleasures of the world, as to overlook and 
turn away from objects of misery ;" therefore com- 
passion is also given us, to back up benevolence in 
case of the distressed, " to gain the unhappy admit- 
tance and access, and to make their case attended 
to ; " when he points out the correspondence of com- 
passion with our circumstances as placed in a world 
of sorrow, and where men have much more power 
of doing mischief to one another than good ; when 
he scatters to the winds the over-subtle theories of 
the selfish philosophers, that benevolence is nothing 
more than delight in the exercise of power, and 
compassion nothing more than fear for ourselves in 
disguise, — he not only brings evidence to the wisdom 
and beneficence of the Creator, but also elicits from 
our nature an independent testimony to the morality 
of the Gospel, which is said in various parts of Holy 
Scripture to be all summed up in love. And this 
indication of the path in which our nature, as well 
as Scripture, indicates that our duty lies, passes in 
Butler's hands into an admonition to walk in that 
path, into a plain pressing home of duty upon the 
conscience. So that besides finding" footsteps of the 



BUTLER. 



149 



Creator in the structure of trie mind, we find also 
footsteps for our own conduct in daily life, and foot- 
steps in which the preacher exhorts us to plant our 
feet. And this is what Butler himself says in the 
following passage, which is quite in his own terse 
and solid manner : — " As all observations of final 
causes, drawn from the principles of action in the 
heart of man, compared with the condition he is 
placed in, serve all the good uses which instances of 
final causes in the material world about us do ; and 
both these are equally proofs of wisdom and design 
in the Author of nature : so the former serve to 
further good purposes ; they show us what course of 
life we are made for, what is our duty, and in a 
peculiar manner enforce upon us the practice of it."* 
Before taking leave of this part of the subject, it 
may be allowable to express the wish that Butler's 
Sermons, considered as a great argument, not only 
in favour of the wisdom and beneficence of the 
Creator, but also in corroboration of Christian mora- 
lity, should be recast by some competent person, 
and reproduced with amplifications and additions in 
a popular form. Butler's style, though it has a 
massive grandeur and solidity in it — the just expres- 
sion of the author's mind, and dear, if it were only 
as a memorial of him, to those who owe him an 
intellectual and moral debt of gratitude — is yet any- 



* Serm. YI., " Upon Compassion," p. 87. 



150 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES : 



thing but attractive to the general reader. The 
weighty thoughts are too tersely enunciated ; and 
though here and there an almost grim stroke of 
sarcastic humour * lights up the page, there is very 
little light beyond this. It is probable that from the 
fact of the mass of men being so outward, so little apt 
to reflect upon themselves and the processes of their 
own minds, Butler's ' Natural Morality* (if we may 
so term it) could never be made as interesting to 
the many as Paley's ' Natural Theology.' But we 
cannot but think that something might be done 
towards the popularising of so important an apolo- 
getic work by one who had first himself obtained 
an insight into, and a thorough grasp of the argu- 
ment. The Sermons want cohesion and method; 
they are all rather essays towards a great moral 
theory than the orderly development of one. And 

The 1 Quarterly' reviewer of tradict its own end," he prefaces 
Mr. Leslie Stephen's book on | the discussion thus : " These in- 
' English Thought in the Eigh- quiries, it is hoped, will be favour- 
teenth Century,' is " disposed to j ably attended to ; for there shall 
think that the chief character- | be all possible concessions made 
istic of the century was its power ; to the favourite passion, which 
of humour," a power which, he hath so much allowed to it, and 
says, took a different shape in J whose cause is so universally 
Addison and Swift, but was a j pleaded : it shall be treated with 
feature common to the minds of \ the utmost tenderness and concern 
both of them. Certainly every for its interests." We think his 
now and then humour oozes | humour was rather of Swift's 
out in Butler, as, for example, ' type, with a dash of melancholy 
where he is about to consider and cynicism in it, only tempered 
whether self-love " may not pos- and chastened in Butler by devo- 
sibly be so prevalent as to ; tion and sobriety of mind, 
disappoint itself, and even con- | 



I 



BUTLER. 



151 



this might at least be redressed. What a treatise 
might have been added to the apologetic literature 
of the Church, had such a writer as Archbishop 
AYhately recast in his own mind the argument of 
these grand Sermons, and expressed it with his own 
luminousness and perspicuity ! 

II. But it is quite possible to bring these Sermons 
strictly under the category of Sermons by regarding 
them as masterly expositions of certain great truths 
of Holy Scripture. 

(1.) And first of that statement, which stands at 
the head of the inspired history of the human 
race : " And God said, Let us make man in our 
image, after our likeness .... So God created man 
in his own image, in the image of God created he 
him." * That Butler himself regarded his studies 
of Human Nature in this light, although he nowhere 
professes a formal exposition of the text just quoted, 
is evident from the following observations, which 
are made incidentally. After a powerful discourse 
upon Resentment, in which he vindicates for that 
passion its place and functions in the moral system, 
shows, e.g., that it is a u balance to the weakness of 
pity," which, if not thus held in check, would render 
the execution of justice upon criminals u exceedingly 
difficult and uneasy," — he concludes with this re- 
flection : " Men may speak of the degeneracy and 
corruption of the world, according to the experience 

* Gen. i. 26, 27. 



152 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



they have had of it ; but human nature, considered 
as the Divine workmanship, should methinks be 
treated as sacred : for in the image of God made He 
man." And in a long note to his first Sermon, 
having exposed the unsoundness of Hobbes's theory 
that every appearance of good- will and benevolence 
which presents itself in human nature, is resolvable 
into the love of power, and delight in the exercise of 
it, he adds : " These are the absurdities which even 
men of capacity run into, when they have occasion 
to belie their nature, and will perversely disclaim 
that image of God which was originally stamped 
upon it, the traces of which, however faint, are 
plainly discernible upon the mind of man." Butler's 
method of treating this great subject cannot be 
thoroughly understood without considering the way 
in which he was led to it. It is to be remembered 
that he found a selfish theory of morals exclusively 
in possession of the field of thought, a theory which 
it was fashionable for the sceptical fops of the reign 
of George II, to affect, and which gave them a con- 
venient plea for their own cynical Epicureanism, and 
for disregarding the interests and feelings of their 
neighbour to any extent. "Vain, luxurious, and 
selfish effeminacy," says a contemporary,* " was the 



* Brown, iu his " Estimate of 
the Manners and Principles of 
the Times" ( published in 1757), 
as quoted in the ' Quarterly Re- 



view ' for April 1877, " English 
Thought in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury," p. 410. 



BUTLEK. 



153 



chief character of the age," and it was built upon an 
erroneous philosophy which derived its whole pres- 
tige from having been broached by Hobbes and other 
writers, whose views it was accounted a mark of 
advanced intelligence and higher cultivation to 
adopt. " Vices and follies have their turns," says 
Butler, "and the distinctive vice and folly of the 
present day is to profess a contracted spirit, and 
greater regards to self-interest than appears to have 
been done formerly." And again, in his Preface : 
" There is a strange affectation in many people of 
explaining away all particular affections, and repre- 
senting the whole of life as nothing but one con- 
tinued exercise of self-love." Now Butler's enterprise 
was to explode the false theory under which the 
selfishness and cynical indifference of his age veiled 
itself, to vindicate human nature from the calumnies 
which this theory put upon it, and to show, without 
the aid of Revelation, from a simple and not over 
subtle analysis of it, that it was made originally in 
the image of God. This, we conceive, he has done 
triumphantly, in such a way as to set the question at 
once and for ever at rest. And what, it may be 
asked, are the traces of this image of God as dis- 
covered in human nature ? " We have no clear 
conception," says Butler, " of any positive moral 
attribute in the Supreme Being but what resolves 
itself up into goodness " or benevolence. Now it is 
just the natural feeling of benevolence, the existence 



151 



CLASSIC PKEACHEES: 



of which in man's heart had been called in question 
by the selfish philosophy of Butler's day. It is 
therefore this point which he labours to establish, 
showing the reality of the feeling, and the impossi- 
bility of resolving it, without coming to an absurdity, 
into any form of self-love, and pointing out how the 
gratification of it is so far from being inconsistent 
with self-love, that it is one of the highest and purest 
enjoyments known to us ; how, in order to secure it 
from being ousted by competition from other prin- 
ciples, it is subsidised and seconded by compassion ; 
and how conscience, in the survey of our actions, 
reflects with complacency upon those done from its 
promptings, and sets upon benevolence the seal of 
its approval. Now we are distinctly told — in the 
Scriptures — told twice over by way of emphasizing 
an assertion of such paramount importance, that 
" God is love."* And we know also (the whole Bible 
from beginning to end is a gradual unfolding of the 
great truth) that when sin made its entrance into the 
world, and blighted the hearts and hopes of men, 
this love of God took the aspect of compassion or 
mercy towards the sinner. The Gospel in all its 
provisions, whether for the acceptance of man with 
God, or for his renewal after the image of Him who 
created him, is a scheme of Divine mercy. And 
yet we are constantly assured that this scheme con- 



* 1 John iv. 8, 16. 



BUTLER. 



155 



tributes, as no other arrangement could have done, 
to God's own glory, and that the hallowing of His 
name — the universal acknowledgment of Him on the 
part of all His rational creatures as a most tender 
Father, who vet loves His children too well and 
wisely to suffer sin upon them — is the end of ends 
which is to be pursued by all His rational creatures, 
both in prayer and endeavour, and which therefore 
must be an end with Himself. And the trace of 
this in the moral economy of man is what Butler 
has so thoughtfully and carefully pointed out ; the 
perfect consistency of benevolence with reasonable 
self-love, which last he fully admits (and indeed 
asserts) to be one of the higher principles of our 
nature, and a principle by which, according to the 
constitution of that nature, we cannot but be, and 
ought to be, strongly influenced. There is this 
consistency also in the Divine Mind. The Heavenly 
Father finds His greatest delight and blessedness, 
His glory and His joy, in re-admitting sinners to full 
conimuriion with Himself, through that Mediator 
whose precious work of atonement proclaims His holi- 
ness, and justice, and truth, with no less emphasis 
than His long-suffering, His mercy, and His love. 

I say His holiness, and justice, and truth ; for when 
Butler says that " we have no clear conception of 
any positive moral attribute in the Supreme Being, 
but what may be resolved up into goodness," we 
must take him as meaning exactly what he says : 



156 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



not that there are no other features in the Divine 
character but goodness, but that all its other features 
are resolvable into this. " God is love ;" but He is 
light, and truth, and holiness, and justice, yea, and 
moral indignation also : only none of these attributes 
is so fundamental as love — each of them is ultimately 
resolvable into love. Sunlight is found, when ana- 
lysed, to comprise sombre as well as bright rays — 
indigo, blue, and violet, as well as red, yellow, orange 
and green ; the indigo ray is an element in the light 
no less than the yellow. The remissness of a 
government in punishing obstinate and hardened 
criminals, the letting such characters loose upon 
society, and putting the lives and properties of the 
innocent at their disposal, would not be benevolence 
or love to the public, — would not be care for the 
general good, but the reverse. And on the other 
hand, the making an example of offenders, and 
visiting them with condign punishment, though it 
does not bear the aspect of love to them, yet does 
not imply the least ill-will to them, and is clearly 
enough resolvable into benevolence to the public and 
care for the general good. Butler shows that "when 
benevolence is said," in the Scriptures, " to be the 
sum of virtue, it is not spoken of as a blind propen- 
sion, but as a 'principle in reasonable creatures, and 
so to be directed by their reason," in order that it 
may attain its end, which end he points out as being 
not always the avoiding of inconvenience to indivi- 



BUTLEE. 



157 



duals, or even classes, but " the greatest public 
good." — It may be added that truth also, — though, 
like any one of the seven prismatic rays in light, it 
may be looked at separately and distinctly, and must 
be so by creatures like ourselves, whose minds must 
take a subject to pieces in order to comprehend it, — 
is yet resolvable into love or goodness. Suppose a 
man, either by words or his method of action, to 
raise expectations in the minds of others which his 
conduct towards them entirely disappoints, is that 
goodness or the reverse ?* The Scribes and Pharisees 
were men whose whole life was a lie, who cloaked a 
worldly heart under the appearance of piety — they 
" for a pretence made long prayers." And side by side 
with this feature of character, this want of truth, was 
a want of love which was the radical or fundamental 
vice in them ; " they devoured widows' houses." 

The sum of what has been said above is, that as 
love embraces all the perfections of the Divine na- 
ture, so also benevolence, or the love of our neigh- 
bour, embraces the whole compass of human duty, 
according to that saying of the Apostle's, which 
forms the text of Butler's two sermons upon the love 

* Professor Mozley, in his j the Apostle's words (Eph. iv. 
recent volume of ' Lectures on j 25), " Putting away lying, 
the Old Testament' ('-Kelation speak every man truth with his 
of Jael's act to the morality neighbour: for we are members 
of her age"), brings out most one of another." Truth is a part 
forcibly the connexion of truth ! of Our duty to our neighbour, 
with love, in commenting upon j Our whole duty to him is love. 



158 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



of our neighbour : " And if there be any other 
commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this 
saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as 
thyself." * 

Before passing on, we may pause to make an 
obvious suggestion, which opens a wide field for use- 
ful and edifying thought. What the various attri- 
butes of the Divine Being are in themselves is a 
problem which, as being high above out of our reach, 
we should, from a feeling of reverence, and under a 
consciousness of our own utter ignorance, decline all 
attempt to solve. The Holy Scriptures, accommo- 
dating themselves to our understanding and condi- 
tion, speak of the Almighty as moved by compassion, 
anger, sorrow, joy, repentance, and other emotions in 
our nature ; and our wisdom is to take these expres- 
sions with all the simplicity of children, and act in 
conformity with the representations thus given to us 
of the character of Him v ith whom we have to do. 
That such representations are not mere figures of 
speech, that there is something underlying them, of 
which the terms expressive of human passions are 
the correct exponents to our minds, is clear from the 
circumstance that, when God took flesh " and was 
made man," He assumed all human affections, and 
through the medium of those affections exhibited to 
us the image of the invisible God. Highly interest- 



* Kom. xiii. 9. 



BUTLER. 



159 



ing and profitable it will be then to take Butler's 
original draught of human nature, and to mark how 
it corresponds in every particular with this image of 
God exhibited to us under four different points of 
view in the evangelical narrative. It would detain 
us far too long to go into particulars ; but two points 
I may briefly throw out for further development in 
meditation : first, the natural shrinking of our blessed 
Lord from mental and bodily suffering, even to the 
deprecation of it, " my Father, if it be possible, 
let this cup pass from me ; " * and yet the entire and 
cheerful resignation with which He at length accepted 
the cup, " my Father, if this cup may not pass 
away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done."| 
What is the first of these but the action of fear, 
seconded by self-love, in the sinless humanity of our 
Blessed Lord, — a self-love which naturally declines 
pain, both bodily and mental, and all the more 
sensitively on account of the purity of the nature 
in which it exists, — a self-love which is the nega- 
tion of stoicism, no less than of weak succumbing 
to calamity ? And what is the second, but an 
exercise by Christ of that resignation to the will 
of God, in which Butler finds the three elements 
of fear, hope, and love, and of which he says 
that it "is the whole of piety," and "includes in 
it all that is good ; " and also an exercise of that 



* St Matt, xxvi. 39. 



f St. Matt. sxvi. 42. 



160 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



benevolence and compassion, the claims of which to 
govern our nature he has so grandly advocated, and 
which redounded to the gratification of the Saviour's 
own heart, when he saw of the travail of His soul, 
and was satisfied. It was the love of God and the 
love of His neighbour, which urged Him not to be 
influenced by sensibility to present suffering (how- 
ever keen), but to endure the cross for the joy that 
was set before Him. This joy was a satisfaction to 
reasonable self-love, which He must perforce have 
fallen short of, had He declined the cup. And 
again, as to resentment, the real object of which, 
Butler tells us, is "not natural but moral evil," not 
suffering but injury, and the indulgence of which in 
a measure, and as moral indignation against wrong- 
doing, he so conclusively justifies, and points out the 
use of,— who does not see that the inspired accounts 
of our blessed Lord's character bear out entirely 
all that he says on the subject ; for while Christ is 
not only the gift, but the impersonation, of Divine 
love and mercy, are we not told of " the wrath of the 
Lamb," and did not His wrath breakout with special 
warmth — never, indeed, against personal outrage, 
however insulting and cruel, but against hypocrisy 
and empty shows of piety, in which the heart had no 
part — and did it not culminate in that tremendous 
denunciation, which yet consisted with strong and 
compassionate yearning over the souls both of the 
blind guides and those who were led by them : "Ye 



BUTLER. 



161 



serpents, ye generation of vipers., how can ye escape 
the damnation of hell ? "* 

(2). Another passage of Holy Scripture, which 
Butler in his Sermons works out, though he does 
not use it formally as a text, is the 11th verse of 
the 139th Psalm: " I will praise Thee; for I am 
fearfully and wonderfully made : marvellous are thy 
works ; and that my soul knoweth right well." It is 
clear from the context that the uppermost thought in 
the mind of the Psalmist was the curious structure 
of the human body, and the gradual building up of 
the members into one organism. A passage in the 
Epistle to the Eomans,t in which the Apostle bor- 
rows an illustration of his subject from the bodily 
organism of man, stands at the head of Butler's first 
Sermon, and this is the way in which he accommo- 
dates it to the purpose of his argument : " Since the 
Apostle speaks of the several members as having 
distinct offices, which implies the miud, it cannot be 
thought an allowable liberty, instead of the liocbj and 
its members, to substitute the whole nature of man. 
and all the variety of internal jjrincijjles which belong 
to U" The truth is that the outward is but a symbol 
and type of the inward; and when the Holy Spirit, 
who spake by the Psalmist, moved him to say that 
he was " fearfully and wonderfully made/' He doubt- 
less had in view no less the intellectual and moral 



* St. Matt xxiii. 33. 
[st. james's.] 



f Eorn. xii. 4, 5. 



162 



classic preachers: 



economy of man than his outward bodily structure. 
And it is this intellectual and moral oeconomy which 
Butler in his Sermons so skilfully lays open and in- 
terprets ; he takes the dissecting knife in hand, and 
shows us by a study of our moral structure both what 
we are intended by our Creator to be, and what, 
alas ! we are. A brief and rapid resume of his results 
may here be in place. 

Human nature is a complex of various prin- 
ciples, which, like the various orders of men in a 
body politic, not only have different functions to 
discharge, but are of different ranks, high and 
low, legislators and artisans, governors and go- 
verned. The lowest of the people in this common- 
wealth are those appetites and instincts, not worthy 
of being called affections, which man shares in com- 
mon with the beasts that perish. Of a superior 
rank to these, as owning the sway of reason, and 
capable of being controlled by it, are the passions 
and affections, fear, hope, compassion, resentment, 
and the rest. Of these there is not one which, apart 
from its excesses, abuses, and perversions, is not 
good — not one which is without its proper function, 
and which does not contribute, by fulfilling that 
function, to the health and vigour of the general 
system. Are there not then affections, it may be 
asked, which are in themselves vicious, and which a 
good man must set himself altogether to eradicate ? 
" Undoubtedly," Butler would answer (if we may 



BUTLEE. 



163 



venture to put words in his mouth), " there are 
many wrong and criminal feelings in our hearts., 
which we are bound to suppress, and to which nu 
quarter must be given ; but if you will philosophi- 
cally analyse these, you will find that each of them 
is the morbid excess, the undue and exaggerated de- 
velopment, sometimes the monstrous caricature, of 
an affection which, as it stood in our nature originally 
wh-n it came fresh from the hands of the Creator, 
was perfectly innocent, holy, and good, and adapted 
to the condition and circumstances of man." What 
can be more criminal, or more mischievous, than 
lust, as it is ordinarily exhibited in human life ? 
what can be more essentially cruel than it is, or, 
as Burns says, more hardening to all within, and 
petrifying to the feeling ? * Yet the instinct, of 
which the crime is a perversion, is, of course, de- 
signed for, and essential to, the continuance of 
the species, and, in the ordinance of holy matri- 
mony, receives the authorization and consecration 
of the most High. Is it possible to conceive that 
this could be the case if it were in itself, apart 
from its misdirection, perversion, and excesses, 
wrong? But resentment is the great instance by 



i! I wave the quantum o' the sin, 
The hazard of concealing ; 
But och ! it hardens a' "within, 
And petrifies the feeling." 

Epistle to a Young Friend. 

M 2 



164 CLASSIC PKEACHEKS : 

which Butler illustrates his principle that " no 
passion which God hath endued ns with can be 
of itself evil ; and yet " that " men frequently in- 
dulge a passion in such ways and degrees that at 
length it becomes quite another thing from what it 
was originally in our nature."* He shows that 
what raises deliberate resentment, the object npon 
which it fastens, is injury and wrong, whether to 
ourselves or others; that "to prevent and remedy 
such injury, and the miseries arising from it, is the 
end for which " it " was implanted in man ; " that 
"fear of their fellow-creatures' resentment does, as 
a fact, often restrain men from injuring others, 
when they would not be restrained by a principle 
of virtue ; " and that passion ateness in strong 
tempers, peevishness in weak ones, exaggeration of 
injuries done to us, dogged refusals to be set right 
as to erroneous impressions connected with offences, 
are all "peculiarities of perverseness and wayward 
humour," to be traced up to anger, indeed, but yet 
not to be confounded with it in its original and 
pure state — unwholesome fermentations of the ori- 
ginal passion, produced by the leaven which has 
wrought in man's heart since the fall, and which 
has turned what was originally a generous wine 
into acrid vinegar. The same leaven has wrought 
similar mischievous results upon the passion of 



* P. 121. 



BUTLER. 



165 



emulation, Emulation is " the desire and hope 
of equality with, or superiority over, others, to 
whom we compare " ourselves," and the end which 
it aims at bringing about is this equality or supe- 
riority. We ought to be emulous of others in 
respect of their virtues and graces, so that emula- 
tion has a real place and function even in the 
spiritual mind. For to what principle but emu- 
lation did St. Paul appeal, when he boasted to his 
Macedonian converts of the promptitude and libe- 
rality of the Church of Corinth in giving aims, 
an appeal to which the passion of emulation in 
the Macedonians had responded; for "your zeal," 
says he to the Corinthians, describing the effect of 
his quotiDg their example, "hath provoked very 
many." * But when emulation seeks not simply our 
own equality with others, but the achievement of 
this equality by the particular means of bringing 
them down to our level, it then becomes envy, and 
is corrupted into an unlawful passion, not to be 
allowed harbour within the precincts of our nature. 
Of the various passions and affections, of which we 
are now speaking, there are some whose primary 
intention is the security and good of the indi- 
vidual (such, for example, as fear of danger, and 
resentment, both which act as protections to the 
individual) ; others, whose primary intention is 



* 2 Cor. ix. 2. 



166 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES: 



rather the security and good of society (such, for 
example, as desire of esteem, compassiou, indig- 
nation against successful vice, and so forth). — 
Above the other affections in rank, as being 
calmer, more free from turbid sediment, more 
purely reasonable, more removed from mere in- 
stincts and blind propensions, are those two ten- 
dencies of our nature, self-love and benevolence, 
the one lending its complexion to one class of the 
lower affections, the other to the other. Each of 
the subordinate passions rests in its own end, fear 
in the security which it seeks, compassion in the 
relief of misery, emulation in the winning of the 
coveted superiority, resentment in the redress 
(whether legal or otherwise) of an injury. But 
these two higher tendencies, self-love and bene- 
volence, have for their ends, the one our own 
happiness and good, the other the happiness and 
good of others. Butler calls attention to the fact 
that men, in the pursuit of their passions, nearly 
as often contradict self-love — act, i. e., in defiance 
of their own good and happiness — as they do bene- 
volence ; and that one who does so, who consults 
present and immediate gratification, in preference 
to what a reasonable self-love tells him is his real 
interest, if called selfish, should be distinguished 
from the man who, from undue self-love, subordi- 
nates in his own mind the interests of others to his 
own, and uniformly seeks the latter at the expense 



BUTLEE. 



167 



of the former. The one, he suggests, should be 
styled sensually selfish; the other, to whom alone 
the term selfish is strictly appropriate, must be 
called, by way of distinction, deliberately selfish. — 
But now comes the highest of all faculties in 
the reasonable soul of man, the conscience, which 
Butler defines as " the principle of reflection in 
men, by which they distinguish between, approve 
and disapprove their own actions." This faculty, 
if it were only that it implies an exercise of the 
judgment or deliberating faculty, is evidently supe- 
rior in rank to the affections and appetites, which 
are mere propensities to certain external objects. 
However weak the conscience may be in point of 
fact, God has stamped authority upon its brow; 
* to preside and govern, from the very economy 
and constitution of in an, belongs to it. Had it 
strength, as it had right ; had it power, as it had 
manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the 
world." Lord Shaftesbury, in his "Inquiry con- 
cerning Virtue," had implied that, putting aside 
our obligations to God, which the atheist does not 
admit, a man who should seriously douht or deny 
that virtue is conducive to happiness, icould he 
under no obligation to follow it. Butler maintains 
that such an obligation would still arise, from the 
indisputable authority with which conscience is in- 
vested, from the claim which it evidently makes to 
absolute control over all the lower faculties; so that 



168 



CLASSIC PREACHERS : 



one who eschews virtue, and chooses vice, stands 
condemned by the constitution of his own nature, 
without bringing in a reference to any judgment 
passed upon his conduct by an external authority. 
We must not omit to observe that, at the beginniug 
of his second Sermon, Butler distinctly recognises 
" some diversity among mankind with respect to " 
this faculty of conscience, and intimates that the 
same standard of right and wrong does not uni- 
formly prevail throughout the world or throughout 
its different ages, thus showing that he regards 
conscience not as a light, but rather as an eye. An 
eye may be partly closed or fully opened ; it may 
have a film over it; its mechanism may be de- 
ranged, and the derangement may trouble its pos- 
sessor with optical illusions; but light cannot mis- 
lead, though the eye may ; illusions can only be 
dissipated, not engendered, by light. Conscience 
is a judge, who deliberates upon evidence submitted 
to him ; the evidence proves, or fails to prove, what 
it was brought to prove; but the judge may be 
under a bias. 

Such is (in outline) Butler's theory of the eco- 
nomy of man's moral nature. And, abstruse and 
difficult as, by his own confession, the subject is, and 
ponderous and wanting in vivacity as most readers 
will think his treatment of it to be, yet, when we 
have once thoroughly mastered it, to what immense 
practical account may it not be turned in the con- 



BUTLER. 



169 



duct of the spiritual life, as an aid to self-exami- 
nation and self-discipline! In the great work of 
our sanctification our own will must co-operate with 
God's grace, if the mental and moral disorder into 
which the fall has plunged us is to be set right. 
But how can mental and moral disorder be satis- 
factorily set right ; how can we see to do our part 
in the work of setting it right, unless we under- 
stand something of the original structure which 
was disorganized by sin? Could a physician hope 
to prescribe successfully without some such know- 
ledge of the human frame as is derived from study 
in the anatomy school ? What chance would a 
watchmaker have of mending a watch, who knew 
nothing of the various wheels and springs which 
constitute the machinery, who had never seen the 
various parts of the interior taken to pieces and put 
together? Nor is it only in self-government and 
knowledge of our own hearts that Butler's studies 
of human nature might greatly assist us. They 
might act as preservatives against that pietism in 
which even the most fervid piety is apt some- 
times to run to seed, and might correct mistakes in 
well-disposed and earnest minds, which, if uncor- 
rected, might fret, discompose, and spiritually retard 
them. Many an ascetic devotee among heathen 
worshippers (and the morbid tendency has not 
unfrequently crept into and corrupted Christian 
devotion) has professed that the end of all moral 



170 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES : 



endeavour should be to get rid of self utterly; to 
suppress, by force and rigour, its earliest and most 
innocent movements, and, if possible, to extinguish, 
it altogether as a motive. The attempt has never 
succeeded. If you try to crush self by the most 
painful discipline of the animal nature, he en- 
trenches himself all the more strongly in the for- 
tress of spiritual pride. Butler would have taught 
you that "reasonable self-love," no less than con- 
science, is a "chief or superior principle in the 
nature of man ; " that " conscience and self-love, if 
we understand our true happiness, always lead us 
the same way ; " that " duty and interest are per- 
fectly coincident ; for the most part in this world, 
but entirely and in every instance, if we take in the 
future and the whole ; " and that therefore neither 
self-love nor our natural susceptibility to pleasure 
and pain are to be, or, indeed, can be, suppressed, 
but only controlled and guided.* 



* As an instance of the loose- 
ness with which even devout 
and able writers express them- 
selves on the subject of self-love, 
take the following, written by 
one of the saintliest men and 
most truly apostolic pastors who 
have graced the Church of Eng- 
land in recent times. It is clear 
that in reproving self-love he 
intended to reprove selfishness 
(its morbid perversion and ex- 



cess) ; for the letters, from which 
the passage is an extract, are 
headed, " On Selfishness." Thus 
he writes to his children, under 
date October 21, 1841 : 

" Learn, in the next place, to 
consider self-love as that which 
separates us from, and Divine 
love as that which unites us to, 
God and our neighbour. In 
other words, learn to regard self- 
love as the source of all disorder, 



BUTLER. 



171 



Again : it would not be difficult to imagine a 
devout person taking up, from those passages of 
Scripture, in which anger is spoken of in the bad 
sense as a passion depraved by the fall, the notion 
that this affection should be wholly eradicated from 
our nature ; that it is to be cut away, root and 
branch ; and that its every working in the heart 
is to be regarded as a working of sin. Possessed 
by this idea, he prays and strives against every 
rising of the feeling, but with no success; he is 
striving, if he could see the truth, after that which 
is not within the designs of G-od's sanctifying grace 
for man ; striving to eliminate certain original 
affections from our nature, rather than to direct 
and control them. It is a weary and disheartening 
thing to strive for the unattainable ; and if a person, 
under the false view I have described, were to take 
up Butler's " Sermon upon Resentment,' 1 and to be 
taught by him that, apart from its perversions and 
excesses, this passion has excellent and necessary 
ends to answer; that its proper objects are injury, 
injustice, and cruelty, by fastening upon which it 



strife, and confusion ; and Divine may please God to call us.' " 
love, as, at once, the parent and (' Practical Religion exemplified 
the nurse of all good order, ! by Letters and Passages from 
harmony and peace, whether in the Life of the late Eev. Kobert 
families, or neighbourhoods, or j Anderson, Perpetual Curate of 
states ; leading us to see God in Trinity Chapel, Brighton.' Sixth 
everything, and ' to do our duty edition. Eivingtons, 1855. Page 
in that state of life, to which it I 133.) 



172 



CLASSIC PREACHEKS : 



does a public benefit, and becomes a security to 
society ; and that the Scripture, when laying re- 
straint upon anger, does so guardedly, bidding us 
to " be angry, and sin not " * (that is, not to 
allow anger to pass into sin, by indulging it to 
excess), and again denouncing punishment against 
every one who is angry with his brother without 
a cause,] it is very possible that such a new light as 
this upon the subject might seem to strike off 
shackles, which had before galled and hindered him 
in his spiritual course, and that he would thence- 
forth go on his w T ay rejoicing with lightened heart 
and disencumbered conscience. 

(3.) The last point with which we propose to 
occupy the attention of our readers is the descrip- 
tion which Butler gives, or, I should rather say, 
which may be elicited from his Sermons, of the 
corruption of our nature and the effects of the fall 
of man. Judging from the Sermons upon Human 
Nature, this corruption consists mainly in the dis- 
organization of the moral system, in the fact of 
conscience being dethroned, and of some unruly 
passion or appetite usurping its place and governing 
the soul. But we should wrong our bishop very 
much if we represented this as being his entire 
account of the disorder into which the fall has 



* Eph. iv. 26. 

t See St. Matt. v. 22. El/o) = 



BUTLER. 



173 



plunged our nature, or if we implied that the dis- 
order itself was only incidentally noticed by him, 
and not made the subject of separate consideration. 
Again we are reminded of a passage of Scripture 
which Butler has most grandly illustrated, without, 
however, making it a formal text, or even expressly 
referring to it : " The heart is deceitful above all 
things, and desperately wicked : who can know it?"* 
As to the exceeding deceitf'ulness of the natural 
heart of man (one of the chief features of its 
wickedness, and closely associated — as want of 
truth always will be — with another feature, want 
of love), was it ever more subtly analysed, more 
wonderfully exposed, than in Butler's two Sermons 
upon the character of Balaam, and upon Self- 
Deceit? These discourses are, indeed, great mas- 
terpieces of spiritual anatomy, showing how 
adroitly men, in the exercise of self-deceit, will 
frame a false conscience, by whose dictates they 
will abide with the utmost punctiliousness, while 
the true conscience is suppressed and held in abey- 
ance, this being one of the tricks by which the man 
will pass with himself for being a strict adherent to 
the inner rule of right ; and when to these is added 
the Sermon before the House of Lords on the day 
of the Martyrdom of King Charles I., in which he 
draws out the Scriptural definition of the teim 



* Jer. xvii. 9. 



174 



CLASSIC PEEACHEKS: 



hypocrisy (" In Scripture, which treats chiefly of 
our behaviour towards God and our own con- 
sciences, hypocrisy signifies, not only the endeavour 
to delude our fellow-creatures, but likewise insin- 
cerity towards Him and towards ourselves") we 
must admit that, if we desire to be practically im- 
pressed with the lesson that " the heart is deceitful 
above all things," we can learn it nowhere so con- 
vincingly as from Butler, and that the penetration 
which his Sermons display into the secrets of the 
human conscience, entitles him to a foremost place 
among our English preachers. 

It should be added that the Sermon upon Self- 
Deceit not only urges the necessity of self-examina- 
tion as a preservative from it, but also gives advice 
for this exercise, which will be found of great service 
in the conduct of it. How helpful for detecting the 
blindness induced by self-partiality would those 
rules of Butler's be, that we should consider what 
parts of our own character and conduct would offer 
most handle to an enemy bent upon disparaging and 
defaming us, and watch ourselves specially in that 
quarter, and that, in judging ourselves for any 
part of our behaviour, we should imagine that our 
neighbour had behaved in exactly the same way, 
and consider what judgment we should give upon 
him. 

And is this all the account then that can be given 
of the corruption of our nature, that it stands in the 



BUTLEK. 



175 



rebellion of the passions against the authority of 
conscience, which is their lawful sovereign, and in 
the self-partiality and self-flattery which are perver- 
sions of self-love, — which are self-love in its excessive 
and morbid actings ? All the account which un- 
assisted reason can give, not all the account which 
may be gathered by the help of Kevelation. Holy 
Scripture teaches that the great principle of our 
recovery from the ruins of the fall is faith — "the 
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things 
not seen." Now there must be a correspondence, one 
would think, between the fall and the recovery, as 
between a disease and the remedy which cures it. 
The remedy cures in virtue of some natural adapta- 
tion which it has to the complaint. The inference 
therefore is forced upon us that the great spiritual 
result of the fall was to bring man under the empire 
of things which are seen, to make him a slave to the 
visible, to loosen his grasp upon all such truths as 
he cannot reach either by the senses or by ex- 
perience, upon the being and presence of God and 
upon his own immortality. He has noble aspirations 
still ; but time and sense lie like a collar round his 
shoulder, and pin him down to the earth. His faith 
was disabled on the moment of his fall. Though 
still able to foresee, and ready to provide against, a 
future, — yet it must be a future in time, of which 
the race to which he belongs has had experience. 
In his left hand he retains the sense of touch ; but 



176 



CLASSIC PREACHERS: 



the right hand * wherewith he might grasp and feel 
the solidity of the things which are not seen and are 
eternal, is withered. This is the reason of the 
phenomenon to which Butler frequently calls atten- 
tion, that men for the present gratification of some 
passion, so often act in direct violation of what they 
know to be for their own interest. The reason is the 
grasp which their senses, and all that is called in Scrip- 
ture " the world," has upon them in virtue of their 
fall, — the urgency with them of the present and the 
visible. Connected with this urgency, there is one 
point which we venture to think that Butler might 
have drawn out more explicitly, without in the least 
departing from his line of excluding Kevelation from 
his view, in order to find evidences strongly cor- 
roborative of its testimony in the structure of the 
human mind. It has been reserved for a divine of 
this century, the late Archdeacon Hare, to bring out 
this point forcibly and fully in his Sermons on the 
Victory of Faith. The point is the extraordinary 
combination in man of present gratification of passion, 
though known to be adverse to his best interests, 
with deliberate provision for a foreseen future in 
time, which future the individual may not live to see. 
The same man, who shows himself utterly unable to 
resist a temptation to some excess of intemperance, 
which he knows will tend to undermine his bodily 



* See St. Luke vi. 6. 



BUTLER. 



177 



health, will sow in anticipation of a harvest, which 
he may never reap, will lahour hard, year after year, 
for a competence which he may never enjoy., will 
even snbmit to toil and self-denial for the attainment 
of some distinction which he may never win. Butler 
would say that this is a case of passion in certain 
points prevailing over reasonable self-love, while in 
other points self-love prevails over the lower instinct-, 
such as love of ease, natural indolence, and averseness 
to trouble. But there is something else in the 
matter besides and beyond a mere compliance or 
non-compliance with self-love. Hare shows most 
conclusively that every success which man has 
reached in his natural life, every realised result of 
civilization, has been reached in the strength of 
faith. Han has projected himself into the unseen 
future, not by a blind or unintelligent instinct, like the 
ant or the bee, but by deliberate and thoughtful fore- 
sight. And this projection of himself into the future 
is faith ; it is the operation of a faculty on things 
which come within human experience, and which, 
as applied to things transcending human experience, 
is the renovating lacultv of our nature. Had Butler 
seized this point, he might have made in his massive 
solid style, a grand disquisition upon it, which would 
have enriched our English literature with one more 
great Sermon. Tersely and with sententious gravity 
he would have prosecuted the great argument, which 
Hare has dilated on so copiously, so expansively, and 
[sr. james's.] N 



178 



CLASSIC PEEACHEKS: 



with such warmth and glow of devout emotion. The 
New Testament suspends the salvation of man on 
the genuineness of his faith. Now, putting aside 
Kevelation altogether, we find in our study of man 
a principle of faith (if by faith be meant realization 
of the unseen), which works, and works powerfully, 
in his natural life. More than this ; we find that 
this faculty of realizing the unseen has been the 
principle by which man has won every success which 
he has achieved, and by which every deed in human 
history, which is good and great, has been done. It 
is, in short, the one faculty, which raises man above 
the beasts that perish, the faculty by which, in its 
higher actings, he does or may take cognizance of a 
God above him and an eternity before him. Butler, 
faithful to his principle of borrowing nothing, not 
even his terms, from Revelation, calls this faculty 
reason. And reason it is in the language of the 
moral philosopher, and under one aspect of it, which 
yet in the language of the Scriptures, and under 
another aspect of it, is faith. Considered as a light 
kindled by the Author of our nature in man's heart, 
it is reason ; considered as a principle, which lifts us 
above our immediate surroundings into a state of 
things concealed from us at present, it is faith. 
But to view it as faith has this advantage, that we 
thus gain a strong evidence in favour of Revelation, 
m hen we come to perceive that the faculty which it 
selects as our moral and spiritual restorative, is the 



BUTLER. 



179 



very faculty to which all past improvements and 
successes in man's natural life have been due. 

But let us be thankful to Butler for the large 
amount of independent evidence to Eevelation which 
his Sermons furnish, without venturing to complain 
that he has not done in this line quite all that he 
might have done. His manner is to be reticent ; to 
withhold much that he might advance ; to drop few 
words, but weighty, into the ears of the wise. We 
feel instinctively in reading his writings, that there 
is a great power in reserve which he does not care 
to display. Suffice it that in the independent study 
of our nature he has arrived at evident and unques- 
tionable traces of some great moral convulsion, 
which somehow (it is not his business to say how), it 
underwent. It is all disorganized, — a body politic 
in a state of mutiny. Affections, perfectly whole- 
some in themselves, have become morbid by some 
perversion or degradation, which in reason there is 
no accounting for. Self-partiality, the excess (or 
rather caricature) of self-love, has brought in its train 
all sorts of blindness and delusion, so that we are 
unable to see ourselves as others see us. The third 
chapter of Genesis gives the key to this otherwise 
unaccountable moral phenomenon. Man is a fallen 
creature, by virtue of an act which his ancestors did, 
in unhallowed ambition, and in gratification of their 
senses. Ever since their descendants have groaned 
under the bondage of the visible world, that lower 

N 2 



180 



CLASSIC PEEACHEES. 



system of things " in which the lust of the flesh, the 
lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," are the domi- 
nant principles. Deliverance is to be had only by 
faith in that Redeemer, whose miraculous birth, and 
passion, and triumph, were dimly and enigmatically 
predicted in the course of the sentence upon the 
arch-offender. But we cannot appreciate the remedy 
without both study and personal experience of the 
disease. And for the analysis of the disease, the care- 
ful moral anatomy which brings it to light, and shows 
us how poorly we realize the ideal of human nature, 
as it existed in the mind and design of the Creator, 
there is no work in English Theology like Bishop 
Butler's Sermons, — none which shows so clearly how 
accordant are the teachings of Revelation with the 
indications of our own nature, as regards the end 
for which we were made, the height from which we 
have fallen, and the path which it behoves us to 
pursue. 



( 181 ) 



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF BISHOP BUTLER, 



Joseph Butler was born at Wantage in Berkshire, 
the birthplace of Alfred the Great, May 18, 1692. His 
father was a retired linen and woollen draper, who, 
wishing to educate his son for the ministry of the sect 
to which he himself belonged, that of the Presbyterians, 
placed him at a very excellent academy at Gloucester 
(afterwards removed to Tewkesbury), which turned 
out several men of mark besides himself; among them 
Archbishop Seeker, a constant friend to Butler during 
his life, and the vindicator of his memory after his 
death. It was here that, at the age of twenty-one, he 
first showed his marvellous metaphysical power in a 
correspondence with Dr. Samuel Clarke on certain diffi- 
culties which had occurred to him in Clarke's famous 
work, ' A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes 
of God.' The correspondence was conducted with a 
modesty which reflected as much credit upon Butler's 
heart as the argument did upon his head, his name 
being carefully concealed, and Seeker conveying the 
letters to the Gloucester Post Office for him, lest his 
incognito should be discovered. Was it the constitu- 
tionally orthodox mind both of Butler and Seeker, or 
the law, whose operation is not unfrequently seen, that 
the children of parents with strong religious views 
repudiate those views for themselves, or a certain 
narrowness which all sects exhibit, and which is re- 



182 



BIOGKAPHICAL NOTICE OF 



pulsive to great and cultivated minds, which made 
these two young men renounce the communion in 
which they had been educated, and, after mature 
consideration, declare for the Church of England ? 
Butler's father, finding that no arguments of the Pres- 
byterian divines were strong enough to shake his 
son's resolution to desert the ranks of the Noncon- 
formists, sent him, at the age of two-and-twenty, to 
Oriel College, Oxford ; a nursing mother then, as in 
later days, of intellectual celebrities. Here he formed 
the acquaintance of Mr. Edward Talbot, son of the 
then Bishop of Durham, and through their interest 
and kindness reached his first steps of preferment, the 
Preachership of the Kolls (1718), and the living of 
Haughton near Darlington (1722), which he was 
allowed shortly after to exchange for the richer benefice 
of Stanhope. His year was divided now between his 
duties as a parish priest at Stanhope, and those attach- 
ing to his preachership at the Polls. It was his power- 
ful execution of these last duties which has given us the 
famous ' Fifteen Sermons,' upon which, as well as upon 
the occasional Discourses annexed to them, must be 
formed our estimate of his character as a preacher. At 
Stanhope, Henry Philpotts, late Bishop of Exeter, on suc- 
ceeding to the living, made every inquiry in his power 
respecting " Eector Butler," his principal informant 
being an old parishioner of ninety-three, who remem- 
bered having frequently seen Butler some eighty years 
ago. Beyond a tradition of the rector's " riding a 
black pony, and riding always very fast" (the latter, 
perhaps, not utterly insignificant as a trait of character ; 
for does not " he driveth furiously " enter as an element 
into the delineation of a character in Holy Scripture ?), 
and the more moral trait of his having a peculiar 



BISHOP BUTLER. 



183 



sensibility to the distresses of beggars, which, led him, 
not indeed always to relieve them (one of his Sermons 
shows that he held that practice to be injudicious and 
unjustifiable), but to run away from their importunities, 
and seclude himself in his house, — scarcely any memo- 
ries survived of the great philosopher and divine. His 
friends thought that his talent was at Stanhope bound 
up in a napkin and hidden in the earth; and when 
Seeker, in his capacity as royal chaplain, preached 
before Queen Caroline in 1732, he took the opportunity 
of a conversation, with which Her Majesty honoured 
him after the sermon, to mention his friend. The 
Queen had thought that Butler was dead; but, on 
making inquiry afterwards on this point, received from 
Archbishop Blackburn the humorous reply; "No, 
madam, not dead, but buried." With the aid of such 
friends as Seeker and Talbot, Butler was speedily 
exhumed. The Queen, a great patroness of literary 
men, at whose request Newton drew up his treatise on 
"Ancient Chronology," and to whose influence Berkeley 
and Seeker, as well as Butler, owed their advancement, 
appointed him Clerk of her Closet in 1736, and in the 
same year procured for him a stall at Eochester. Every 
evening, we are told, from seven till nine, she commanded 
his attendance upon her, in order to enjoy his conversa- 
tion on philosophical and theological subjects — Berkeley, 
Clarke, Hoadly, "and Sherlock, frequently taking part 
in the discussions. It was in 1736 that the great work 
which has immortalised the name of Butler, 4 The 
Analogy of Natural and Eevealed Keligion,' appeared. 
The Queen is said to have greatly admired it; but 
she can hardly have studied it deeply, for it is not 
a book which can be mastered in a short time, and 
Queen Caroline's days were numbered. At the close of 



184 



BIOGEAPHICAL NOTICE OF 



1737 she died, some weeks after receiving privately at 
Butler's hands the Sacrament of the Holy Communion. 
George II., however, showed himself mindful of the 
interest which his consort had shown in Butler; and 
Lord Chancellor Talbot, the brother of his early friend, 
also warmly recommending him, he was consecrated to 
the see of Bristol, December 3, 1738, by Archbishop 
Potter, who in the previous year had been translated 
from Oxford to Canterbury. His friend Seeker had 
occupied the see of Bristol before him, from 1735 to 
1737, and had been succeeded by Dr. G-ooch, who held 
it only for a single year. Butler's tenure of this very 
poorly endowed see was to last twelve years. The 
King's eye, however, was still upon him ; and, by way 
of compensating him for the great poverty of his see, 
he was installed Dean of St. Paul's in the spring of 
1740, a dignity the revenues of which enabled him, as 
he used to say, to make extensive improvements and 
additions to his palace at Bristol. On receiving this 
preferment, he resigned Stanhope and his stall at 
Eochester, and divided his year equally between the 
duties of his deanery and those of his diocese. As to 
the former of these duties, we are told that he never, 
while in residence, failed to attend both the daily 
services in the Cathedral. Building seems to have been 
somewhat of a passion with him ; and an architectural 
decoration which he made in repairing and enlarging his 
palace at Bristol, aroused a senseless outcry, and was 
thought injudicious even by his friend Seeker, warmly 
as he challenged the absurd inference drawn from it. 
Over the holy Table in the palace chapel he placed a 
white marble cross, about three feet high, which was 
thrown up in relief by a slab of black marble, into 
which it was sunk, and was surrounded by a frame of 



BISHOP BUTLER. 



1S5 



beautifully carved cedar-wood, the gift of the Bristol 
merchants. Some fifteen years after his death (in the 
year 1767), an anonymous pamphleteer put forth the 
calumny that he " died in the communion of a church 
that makes use of saints, saints' days, and all the 
trumpery of saint worship," alleging, as one of the 
grounds of this accusation, that he had " put up the 
popish insignia of the cross in his chapel 55 at Bristol. 
His attached friend Seeker (who had become Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury in 1758) vindicated him from 
these aspersions by letters, signed " Misopseudes," 
which appeared in the 1 St. James's Chronicle.' Seeker 
died in the August of the following year (1768) ; so 
that his vindication of Butler may be said to have been 
one of the latest acts of his life. As an act of constant 
friendship, therefore, it raises our estimation of the 
Archbishop; while at the same time a charge so ob- 
viously false and spiteful, brought against a prelate so 
eminent and of such established character as Butler, 
might probably have been better left to expire by its 
own inanity. Men might be apt to think there is some- 
thing in a charge, when the Primate of all England 
condescends to enter the lists against it. But, be this 
as it may, it may soothe the wounded sensibilities of 
the Protestant mind to reflect that this sad proof of 
Butler's deflection from the pure faith of the Reformed 
Church no longer exists. Bristol, which has nobly 
maintained to the present day its character for ico- 
noclasm, could not tolerate such an abomination ; and 
the white cross on the black ground perished in the 
rains of the episcopal palace, when the mob in 1831 
set fire to it. 

Even in a memoir so cursory as the present, it is 
quite impossible to pass over the reminiscence of Butler 



186 



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF 



which has been preserved to us by Dean Tucker of 
Gloucester. When Tucker was a minor Canon of 
Bristol Cathedral, and curate of St. Stephen's Church, 
in that city, his abilities and energy attracted Bishop 
Butler's notice, so that he made him his domestic 
chaplain, and used his interest to obtain for him 
further preferment. The story must be told in the 
Dean's own words ; we are inclined to think it the 
most characteristic of all the anecdotes of the Bishop 
which have come down to us : — 

" The late Dr. Butler, Bishop of Bristol, had a 
singular notion respecting large communities and 
public bodies ; a notion which is not, perhaps, alto- 
gether inapplicable to the present case. His custom 
was, when at Bristol, to walk for hours in his garden 
in the darkest night which the time of the year could 
afford, and I had frequently the honour to attend him. 
After walking some time, he would stop suddenly and 
ask the question, ' What security is there against the 
insanity of individuals ? The physicians know of none ; 
and as to divines, we have no data, either from Scrip- 
ture, or from reason, to go upon relative to this affair.' 
' True, my lord, no man has a lease of his understand- 
ing, any more than of his life ; they are both in the 
hands of the Sovereign Disposer of all things.' He 
would then take another turn, and again stop short : 

* Why might not whole communities and public bodies 
be seized with fits of insanity, as well as individuals ?' 

* My lord, I have never considered the case, and can 
give no opinion concerning it.' ' Nothing but this 
principle, that they are liable to insanity, equally, at 
least, with private persons, can account for the major 
part of those transactions of which we read in history.' 
I thought little," adds the Dean, " of that odd conceit 



BISHOP BUTLER. 



187 



of the Bishop at that juncture ; but I own I could not 
avoid thinking of it a great deal since, and applying it 
to many cases." 

But we must hasten on to the few remaining events 
of Butler's life. The King's favour, probably in con- 
sequence of the late Queen's partiality for him, still 
accompanied him. In 1746, when he had been eight 
years at Bristol, he was appointed Clerk of the Closet. 
And he might have stood, had it so pleased him, on 
the highest pinnacle to which in this country eccle- 
siastical ambition can aspire. For on the death of 
Archbishop Potter, in 1747, the Primacy of all England 
was offered to, and declined by him, with the observa- 
tion that, " it was too late for him to try to support a 
falling Church ;" words which, while they attest his 
modesty, and the true greatness of a soul weaned from 
earthly ambitions, at the same time have a dash of con- 
stitutional melancholy in them. The Church of Eng- 
land in his day may have seemed to be, and may really 
have been on the surface, torpid and unenergetic ; and 
still more depressing times were in store for her after 
his death ; but " as a teil tree, and as an oak, whose 
substance is in them, when they cast their leaves," 
there was in her during all that dreary age a " holy 
seed," which was "the substance thereof;" and the 
energy and activity, which of late years has manifested 
itself in our communion, are but the result of prin- 
ciples which even then were working in the hearts of 
English Churchmen, deep in the soil, but not yet ap- 
parent above the surface. Three years after the offer 
of the Primacy had been made to Butler (in 1750) the 
see of Durham fell vacant, and was offered to Butler, 
with a private intimation that the lord-lieutenancy 
would be no longer attached to it, but conferred upon a 



188 



BIOGKAPHICAL NOTICE OF 



secular peer. He declined it, in the first instance, on 
the ground that " it was a matter of indifference to him 
whether he died Bishop of Bristol, or of Durham ; but 
not a matter of indifference to him whether the honours 
of the see were invaded during his incumbency." It 
must be well if in these days, when it is the fashion to 
strip bare every eminent position not only of its emolu- 
ments, but of every scrap of ancient prestige which has 
clung to it from the earliest period, a similar spirited 
reply were made by all those to whom the denuded 
position is offered. In Butler's case the resistance 
which he thought it right to make to the minister's 
proposal was not allowed to outweigh his claims to the 
high position. The see was again offered to him, and 
the removal of its ancient honours not further insisted, 
upon. He did homage for the see on the 9th of Novem- 
ber, 1750, and was enthroned at Durham the same day 
by proxy. Horace Walpole's sneer at this translation, 
vented in the course of the next year (1751), when the 
bishops had offended him by offering no opposition 
to the Eegency Bill, was as follows : " The Bishop of 
Durham has been wafted to that see in a cloud of meta- 
physics, and remains absorbed in it." The income of 
the bishopric of Durham was large ; and Butler spent 
it, as a bishop should, in acts of large munificence and 
hospitality. On one occasion, when applied to for aid 
towards a newly-projected benevolent institution, he 
called for his steward, and asked how much money he 
had in his possession. On being told five hundred 
pounds, he exclaimed, " Five hundred pounds ! What 
a shame for a bishop to have so much ! Give it away ; 
give it all to this gentleman for his new institution." 
Three days in every week the Bishop entertained 
publicly, with all suitable circumstance, the gentry of 



BISHOP BUTLEK. 



189 



the county and neighbourhood ; while in private his 
habits were simple and frugal even to plainness, and on 
the other days, even when he was not quite alone, the 
provision made for the table consisted of only two 
dishes. But the way of life thus indicated was not to 
continue long. Our prelate, having given a glimpse to 
the world of the way in which it behoved a Prince- 
Bishop to live, was soon to be withdrawn from it. In 
1752 his constitution seemed to break up. Clifton was 
resorted to, and then the waters of Bath, but with no 
good effect. On Tuesday, the 16th of June, 1752, the 
great Christian philosopher entered into the state 
where all those mysteries which hang over religion, 
both natural and revealed, and which not the subtlest 
or profoundest understanding can enable man to resolve, 
are made plain in the light of God's countenance. One 
or two edifying anecdotes are told of his latest senti- 
ments, for which probably (even if they have been 
added to and touched up) there is some foundation in 
truth. " In his dying moments the Bishop expressed it 
as an awful thing to appear before the moral Governor 
of the world" (a sentiment so coincident with the 
whole strain of Butler's theology, that we can entirely 
understand its recurring to him with peculiar force in 
the solemn hour when flesh and heart were failing). 
" On this his chaplain " (Dr. Foster) " expounded the 
efficacy of the blood which cleanseth from all sin, and 
in terms so adjusted to the felt and expressed apprehen- 
sions of the dying prelate, that his last utterance was, 
* 0, this is comfortable !' with which words on his lips 
he expired." Butler must have been perfectly familiar 
with the text 1 John i. 7 ; may have often studied it and 
preached upon it ; but now at length had come to him 
the moment of spiritual susceptibility, when the testi- 



190 



BIOGEAPHICAL NOTICE OF 



mony of " the cleansing blood " winged its way through 
his soul with all the power of a spiritual cordial. And 
as to the preliminary sense of awe, in the prospect of 
appearing before God, this was a condition of the 
comfort reaching him, and doubtless in such a character 
as his was unusually deep. The wise man after the 
flesh, if truly instructed in the knowledge of God and 
of himself, has no other hope than that which supports 
the rudest peasant's soul ; nay, in proportion to the 
amount of that knowledge is the depth of his humilia- 
tion ; and " he fears as he enters into the cloud," even 
though it be the bright cloud of God's presence and 
smile. And so Bishop Butler entered into rest in the 
comfortable faith of Christ's atonement : — 

" Just as I am, without one plea, 
Save that Thy blood was shed for me, 
And that Thou bidd'st me trust in Thee, 
O Lamb of God, I come." 

A piece of information given us by the poet Cole- 
ridge in his ' Table-talk ' summarizes in three or four 
lines the moral character of the man. Butler's was a 
strong soul, liable to strong and stormy temptations ; 
the howling winds swept across it ; the waves of passion 
surged over it and rose mountain-high ; but the reason 
of the Christian Philosopher (which, as I have endea- 
voured to show at the end of my Lecture on his charac- 
ter as a preacher, is only faith in another aspect of it) 
held the helm, and kept the vessel true to her course. 
"The great Bishop Butler," says Coleridge, "was all 
his life struggling against the devilish suggestions of 
his senses, which would have maddened him if he had 
relaxed the stern watchfulness of his reason for a single 
moment." 



BISHOP BUTLEE. 



191 



He was buried in his first Cathedral at Bristol, near 
lie episcopal throne, on June 20, 1752, with as little 
state as might be, Mr. Chapman, the Sub-dean of 
Bristol, reading the Office for the Burial of the Dead. 



The facts and anecdotes in the above ' Biographical 
Notice' are almost all drawn from the Eev. Thomas 
Bartlett's ' Memoirs of Joseph Butler, late Lord Bishop 
of Durham' [London: John W. Parker, 1839]. The 
world is much indebted to Mr. Bartlett for having col- 
lected with great industry, and recorded with accuracy 
and fidelity, every reminiscence which survived of his 
illustrious kinsman by marriage ; one who has been 
justly described as " not only pre-eminent in his own 
day, but in the foremost rank of the immortalized sages 
of the world." 



Chronology of Bishop Butler's Life. 

Joseph Butler, born May 1 8, 1692 

Commences correspondence with Dr. Clarke .. .. Nov. 4, 1713 

Entered as a Commoner at Oriel Mar. 17, 1714 

Appointed Preacher at the Eolls 1718 

Took the decree of B.C.L 1721 

Presented by Bishop Talbot to the living of Haughton . . 1722 

Exchanges Haughton for Stanhope 1725 

Publishes his ' Fifteen Sermons ' 1726 

Eesigns Preachership at the Rolls Autumn, 1726 

Geo. II. and Queen Caroline of Brandenburg- \ T ,, ,„ 07 
Anspach come to the Throne j June 11, l/z/ 

D.C.L., and Chaplain to Lord Chancellor Talbot . . . . 1733 

Clerk of the Closet to the Queen 1736 

Prebendary of Eoch ester Aug. 7, 1736 



192 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF BISHOP BUTLER. 



' The Analogy ' published May, 1736 

Queen Caroline died Nov. 20, 1737 

Butler consecrated Bishop of Bristol Dec. 3, 1738 

Installed Dean of St. Paul's .. .. May 24, 1740 

Refused the Archbishropic of Canterbury 1747 

Translated from Bristol to Durham Nov. 9, 1750 

The Regency Bill 1751 

Dies at Bath, aged 60 Tues. June 16, 1752 

Buried in Bristol Cathedral Sat. June 20, 1752 



